Until the mid-1990's, much of Ontario's municipal asset management was closely linked to the conditional funding grants administered centrally by the provincial government. In the years since the demise of that program, there has been a succession of short-term funding programs that have required municipalities to commission expensive studies in support of their grant submissions, or to link their capital investment in one category of infrastructure with infrastructure assets of lesser priority in order to qualify for partial funding. As a result, local investment in the construction and maintenance of municipal capital assets has been both sporadic and by and large, woefully underfunded since 1996. The result is a province-wide patchwork quilt of infrastructure that is in an undeniable state of decline.
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