The Town of View Royal will not allow a sewage treatment plant to be built on undeveloped waterfront property at Thetis Cove, says Mayor Graham Hill.
“Let me be clear: This land behind Admirals Walk in View Royal is not available for sewage processing nor for any other industrial use,” Hill said in a letter to the Times Colonist, approved unanimously by his town council.
The property, at the end of Hallowell Road, is zoned residential, part of View Royal’s official community plan and currently before town staff as a potential residential development, Hill wrote. “It would be folly for the Capital Regional District to purchase another site only to learn that their investment is sown on infertile ground.”
Hill presented the letter to his council on Tuesday. Councillors unanimously endorsed the position.
In an interview, the mayor said he has already heard from numerous residents near the site who are worried their property values could drop if they become neighbours to a sewage facility.
“The basis of that is our official community plan,” Hill said. “When people invest in their homes, they rely on those plans for making the largest investment they are ever going to make. There are a few hundred homes there.”
The community plan also calls for amenities, such as parks, in the residential development, he said.
The owners of Thetis Cove recently went public to say the CRD failed to give their site a fair review as part of the planned $783-million sewage treatment project.
The current CRD plan calls for a sewage treatment facility at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt, with the resulting sludge pumped 18 kilometres to a biosolids facility at Hartland Landfill in Saanich.
Thetis Cove’s owners say the View Royal site is large enough to accommodate both facilities, and $2 million cheaper than the $17 million the CRD paid for property on Viewfield Road that it considered and then rejected as a possible sewage plant location.
The CRD said it examined Thetis Cove but the site wasn’t large enough, was zoned residential and was close to nearby homes.
Several politicians on the CRD sewage committee have said they want staff to give Thetis Cove another look, as part of a motion that calls for new potential sites to be identified throughout the region.
Hill said all the speculation isn’t acceptable for his residents, who have put their faith in View Royal’s plans for the site.
