The company that won the bid to build a sewage treatment plant at McLoughlin Point two years ago for $170 million says it could build the plant today for an extra $20 million, says Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen.
Harbour Resource Partners “have come forward with an update on their March 2014 numbers which suggest that March 2016 costs would be approximately $20 million more,” Jensen said Thursday.
Jensen plans to provide correspondence from Harbour Resource Partners to the next Capital Regional District sewage committee meeting. If his numbers prove right, $190 million for a regional plant represents a whopping saving compared with Rock Bay in Victoria, the current lowest-cost option, which is estimated at $692 million, including $393 million for liquid waste treatment, $67.2 million for land and $32.5 million for a new outfall at Clover Point.
But Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, who chairs the sewage committee, said going back to McLoughlin means going to war.
“We could go there if we wanted to cause a war in the region, but we’ve got to find a way forward that honours the taxpayer and everyone at the table,” Helps said.
“I think if a centralized [plant at] McLoughlin was the right site, it would have been built already. We wouldn’t have had two years of consternation about no McLoughlin, no McLoughlin,” Helps said.
“I want to find a solution that’s cost effective, but also that has more than a slim, bare majority moving forward.”
Esquimalt council blocked the building of a regional plant at McLoughlin two years ago after hundreds of people, during several days of public hearings, said that they opposed the idea.
Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins maintains McLoughlin is not on the table for a regional treatment plant as it has not been put forward by the municipality as a potential location in the current site selection process.
Jensen has been arguing the savings to be had from going to McLoughlin are too big to ignore. He notes the site is owned by the CRD and is zoned for a sewage treatment plant.
Experts agree it’s cheaper to build a plant closer to an outfall into the ocean. An estimated $250 million of the cost to build at Rock Bay is for pipes and pumps to pump raw sewage from outfalls at Clover Point and McLoughlin Point to Rock Bay for treatment and then to pump the treated effluent back for discharge through the outfalls.
Opinion surveys conducted as part of the public consultation process for this round of site selection show that keeping costs down is the No. 1 priority for residents, followed by environmental benefit.
At a heated meeting this week, CRD directors decided against including McLoughlin as a potential site for a stand-alone regional sewage treatment plant.
Instead, CRD staff have been directed to provide cost estimates for a tertiary plant at Rock Bay in combination with a small Colwood plant, and an option that would involve a combination of a tertiary plant at Clover Point along with a tertiary plant at McLoughlin Point and possibly Macaulay Point, plus the same Colwood site. (Tertiary plants can produce water clean enough for use.)
Helps said she wants to see those costs before making any decisions. “I think part of the problem is everyone is making a decision, or trying to make a decision, before all the information is in. So let’s see what staff comes back with.”
Helps said she’s not convinced the hundreds of millions of dollars in savings that some are talking about from going to McLoughlin will materialize.
“I’m not an engineer. I’m not an economist. I’m someone who is trying to steward forward a cantankerous-at-best political process and I’m going to rely on the report we get from staff to help inform that. So let’s see what they come back with. Is it still hundreds of millions of dollars if we put an eastside plant at Clover and a westside plant at McLoughlin? I don’t know.”
Meanwhile, senior government funding deadlines are fast approaching. Already working on a one-year extension, the CRD has until the end of the month to submit a detailed plan for wastewater treatment or risk losing $83.4 million from federal Crown corporation PPP Canada. The federal government has also committed $120 million from the Building Canada Fund and $50 million from the Canada Green Fund.
