Closing the $17B Infrastructure Gap: RMA
- Municipal Affairs
- 4 hours ago
- 2 min read
Rural municipalities across Alberta own and operate most of the province’s roads, bridges, and utility systems. These are the assets that connect communities, move goods, and support the resource-based and emerging industries that keep Alberta competitive. But for years, those same municipalities have been asked to do more with less—facing chronic underfunding, rising construction costs, aging infrastructure, and increasingly constrained budgets.
This week, the Rural Municipalities of Alberta launched a new five-week awareness and advocacy campaign called Closing the Gap: The Rural Infrastructure Funding Deficit. The goal is simple but urgent: to highlight the scale of the problem and push for practical, long-term solutions.
As RMA President Kara Westerlund explains, it often surprises Albertans to learn that rural municipalities manage a larger infrastructure portfolio than even the provincial government itself. Yet those municipalities are being stretched to maintain aging systems while also preparing for new industrial and economic opportunities.
The campaign builds on RMA’s 2024 Rural Municipal Infrastructure Deficit Project, which used an innovative methodology to assess infrastructure conditions and funding needs. The findings were stark—a rural infrastructure deficit of more than $17 billion in 2023, projected to climb past $25 billion by 2025 without provincial intervention.
Over the coming weeks, Closing the Gap will explore the economic impacts of deteriorating infrastructure, the growing burden on rural taxpayers, and the need for fair, predictable provincial funding. It will also outline RMA’s recommendations for Budget 2026, including short-term stabilization funding, long-term funding reform, and improved province-wide asset management.
And today on Municipal Affairs, we’ll sit down with RMA President Kara Westerlund to learn more about the campaign, why it matters now, and what RMA hopes to achieve—both in the short term to stabilize rural infrastructure, and in the long term to build a more sustainable, predictable funding model for communities across Alberta.
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