If you want to have your say on the region鈥檚 biggest-ever infrastructure project, you had better do it fast 鈥� the opportunity for public input is rapidly dwindling.
As Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps notes in her commentary on the page opposite, a decision on regional sewage treatment, estimated to cost about $1 billion, will be made at the end of February, and public input will figure prominently in that decision.
The situation is urgent. The federal and provincial governments have ordered the Capital Regional District to provide sewage treatment for the region. Grants of up to $500 million from the two levels of government have been promised, based on the assumption that a single treatment plant will be built.
Already working on a one-year extension, the CRD has until March 31 to submit a detailed plan for wastewater treatment or risk losing $83.4 million from PPP Canada, a federal Crown corporation. The federal government has also committed $120 million from the Building Canada Fund and $50 million from the Canada Green Fund.
In 2006, the province ordered the region to start planning for infrastructure that would see an end to discharging sewage into the ocean. In 2012, the federal government passed a law requiring all high-risk 91原创 cities 鈥� including Victoria 鈥� to provide secondary sewage treatment by 2020. It鈥檚 going to be a challenge to meet that deadline.
We were nearly there. McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt was chosen as the site for the treatment plant, and in 2014, a company was chosen to design and build the facility. The cost then was estimated at $783 million.
But the project was derailed when Esquimalt council rejected a variance to the zoning that would have allowed a slight increase in the plant鈥檚 footprint.
The project had been plagued by accusations that the public had not been sufficiently consulted, but that鈥檚 not fair. The wastewater committee and Seaterra, the entity appointed to manage the project, had engaged in scores of meetings, consultations, open houses and reports since 2006. Dozens of meetings were held with municipal councils, community associations and service clubs. The public was consulted at almost every step of the way.
That 鈥渁lmost鈥� proved fatal. After secret negotiations, the CRD abruptly announced in 2013 that it had paid $17 million for a warehouse on Viewfield Road in Esquimalt as a site for a plant that would process sewage solids. The move drew a storm of protest and the plan was quickly abandoned, but the damage was already done to any goodwill the CRD had built up.
It didn鈥檛 help when the entity appointed to manage the process was named Seaterra, a public-relations ploy clearly designed to lend an aura of fresh air and sea breezes to a project that would process human waste. It was just a name and it shouldn鈥檛 have mattered, but it did.
Wastewater committee members are describing their consultants and experts as professional, independent engineers who will look at all options. Current discussions make it sound as if the previous plan was something sketched out on a dinner napkin after a few drinks.
But that plan was the result of years of careful studies and intense work by professional, independent engineers 鈥� $65 million worth. Is all that work and expense to be wasted? Let鈥檚 hope not.
No matter what decisions are made, there will be vociferous objections. Achieving consensus on the issue is impossible. But the public must be heard, and the CRD鈥檚 core area wastewater treatment committee has bent over backwards to provide that opportunity.
It鈥檚 up to citizens to take advantage of that opportunity now, before time runs out.
