The sewage-treatment project for Greater Victoria has clearly gone off the rails. It is time for the province to step in. View Royal Mayor David Screech spoke for thousands when he said at Wednesday’s Capital Regional District sewage committee meeting: “I just want to scream.”
Committee members had rejected an attempt to get updated costs on a regional sewage plant at McLoughlin Point. Instead, the committee will forge ahead with plans to examine cost estimates for a plant at McLoughlin only if it is built in conjunction with a major plant at Clover Point. Estimates for a plant in the West Shore will also be considered. Permutations and combinations include siting the treatment plant at Rock Bay.
Screech has pinpointed where this project has gone horribly wrong.
“I just cannot tell you how absurd and how silly I think it is that politically driven motives are trying to design a sewage-treatment system,” he said. “It is absurd, the level of political interference in making what should be a good engineering decision.”
The McLoughlin Point site was not pulled out of a hat. It was chosen after intensive research. The design was put together by experienced engineers after years of work and more than $60 million in costs.
The CRD owns the site and obtained the appropriate zoning from Esquimalt. But when a variance was needed for a slightly enlarged footprint, Esquimalt council rejected that application, effectively killing the project.
It was a good plan and it was scuttled by politics. It didn’t help that the CRD secretly bought a site in Esquimalt and announced it would build a sludge-processing plant there, but everyone involved has admitted the error of that move.
Despite the looming deadline for hundreds of millions of dollars in provincial and federal funding, the CRD started the process over again to find a suitable site and design, trying to replicate in months what had taken engineers years. Extensive efforts have been made to solicit public input; municipalities have been asked to suggest sites. Various proposals have been considered.
And yet the best plan is still McLoughlin Point.
In a Facebook posting, Screech said the lowest-priced option being considered will cost each View Royal household $510 a year, compared to $225 a year for the McLoughlin plan.
The company selected to build the plant told Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen this week it can still build the plant for $20 million more than the original contract price of $170 million. That’s a modest increase, considering the declining dollar and inflation.
Public input is essential, but popular opinion should not replace engineering decisions. It’s clear now that any decision made will be tainted. There are too many sacred cows and vested interests. The public is no longer being properly served, the debate has spiralled out of control and costs appear headed in the same direction.
Last July, Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, in discussing how the Johnson Street Bridge project went awry, said: “Taxpayers should rest assured that the sewage project that I am at the head of … will not have a repeat performance of this because I learned every lesson necessary and then some.”
The province ordered secondary sewage treatment and dictated how it should be done. There’s no indication that order and a similar directive from the federal government will be rescinded. The provincial government should take charge and order solutions.
We hate to think that the locals can’t make their own decisions, but that is what has happened.
