2025 Asset Management Plan

On this page:

• Overview
• About the Asset Management Plan
• Highlights from the Plan
• Resources

Overview

The Region of Waterloo owns and manages physical assets such as roads, traffic signals, buses, water and wastewater treatment plants and pumping stations, groundwater wells, water storage facilities, watermains and sewers, waste management facilities, an airport, administrative and cultural buildings, community housing, and a fleet of vehicles that together total over $11.31 billion in value.

The Region relies on these assets to deliver services, in partnership with seven local municipalities, to over 674,000 residents (2023), including university students.

Properly managing its assets helps to ensure the Region can deliver services safely and reliably and provide value for money and long-term financial sustainability.

The purpose of this Asset Management Plan (AM Plan) is to support the Region’s stewardship of its assets and to meet the requirements for proposed levels of service as outlined in Ontario Regulation 588/17 AM Planning for Municipal Infrastructure (O.Reg. 588/17).

2025 Asset Management Plan

About the Asset Management Plan

Asset Management (AM) is the coordinated activity of an organization to realize value from assets. It is an integrated set of processes and best practices that minimize the lifecycle cost of owning, operating, and maintaining assets, at an acceptable level of risk while continuously delivering established levels of service.

Asset management involves balancing levels of service, associated cost, and risk. The goal is to deliver proposed levels of service at the best possible cost over an asset’s lifecycle within an acceptable level of risk.

The 2025 Asset Management Plan (AM Plan) includes:

• The assets the Region relies on to support service delivery to the community.
• The levels of service proposed to be provided by these assets.
• The assets that will be needed in the future to continue to deliver services safely and reliably.
• The activities needed to sustain assets throughout their lifecycles at the best possible cost and an acceptable level of risk.
• The funds needed for these activities and how they might be raised.
• The steps to improve future versions of the AM Plan.

Asset Management Plan highlights

What is the state of the Region’s infrastructure?

The AM Plan identifies that the Region’s assets are generally in GOOD to FAIR condition, with over 84 per cent of the Region’s assets in fair or better condition, which is referred to as a “state of good repair” (down from 90 per cent in the 2020 AM Plan).

The AM Plan identifies 16 per cent or $1.8 billion in Regional assets that are nearing End of Life (up from $0.7 billion in the 2020 AM Plan).

Following best practice and to minimize lifecycle costs while appropriately mitigating risks, many non-critical assets are planned for replacement on failure or once assessed to be in poor condition.

What is Levels of Service?

Levels of service statements describe the quality of services the Region is striving to provide in each program area. Performance indicators and targets related to our infrastructure assets are used to quantify the service levels that residents expect to receive and the cost to provide the services. Levels of service commonly relate to service attributes such as capacity, function, reliability, quality and affordability.

The Region’s ability to deliver the levels of service outlined in this AM Plan is impacted in large part by:

• Additional infrastructure to serve population growth.
• Upgraded infrastructure to serve changing functional, legislative and sustainability needs.
• Aging infrastructure and the associated need for operations, maintenance and renewal investments to sustain it.

What is the finance plan to manage assets?

Effective asset management practices are integrated with financial planning and budgeting.

The Region plans to invest, on average, approximately $294.1 million per year over the next 10 years to support growth and upgrade of the asset portfolio. Based on this growth and upgrade, the value of the Region’s asset portfolio is estimated to increase from $11.3 billion in 2024 to approximately $14.2 billion by 2034.

In 2025, the Region will expend approximately $1.8 billion in operations, a significant proportion of this will be directed to meet current service levels. This expenditure is expected to increase to $2.3 billion by 2034 to accommodate the above growth and upgrade.

Optimal renewal investment needs refer to the amount of funding required to replace or rehabilitate infrastructure assets at the most cost-effective point in their lifecycle—before significant deterioration occurs but after the asset has delivered its intended service.

Currently, the level of investment in asset renewal in the ten-year capital program of $226.0 million annually falls short of the optimal level of investment needs identified in this AM Plan of $308.8 million annually and represents a renewal funding shortfall of $82.8 million annually.

Lifecycle activities will not be undertaken at the optimal time resulting in failure to minimize total cost of asset ownership and risks to service delivery.