City of Powell River officials plan to approach the provincial government to ask for funding for co-treatment, the proposal to treat the city’s sewage at Catalyst Paper Corporation’s Powell River division.
The city announced on December 20 that its $7.2-million grant application to the Union of BC Municipalities’ (UBCM) Innovations Fund for co-treatment was unsuccessful.
During the UBCM conference in September, councillors met with Minister Pat Bell, who told them if the city wasn’t successful in its grant application, to let him know and he would look to the Treasury Board to try to find the $7.2 million. “We will probably try and visit Victoria and see if they want to give us the money,” said Mayor Dave Formosa. “Failing not getting some grant money for this project, I think I would just recommend we get on with building our own stand-alone facility.”
Formosa also said he knows certain people will say, “’Dave said if you don’t get the grant, it’s over.’ If we don’t get free money for this plan, as far as I’m concerned, I say we move on.”
The list of successful applicants for the Innovations Fund won’t be released until sometime in mid to late January, said Paul Taylor, relationships and communications advisor with UBCM. He said the program was over-subscribed. “For every successful applicant, two applicants weren’t successful,” he said. There were roughly 150 applications, he added, with 50 of those successful.
Local governments were not told why their applications were not successful, Taylor also said.
Formosa said he hasn’t spoken to anyone about why the application wasn’t successful. But he noted the provincial government representatives who championed the project were no longer there, including Dale Wall and Mike Furey, who were both deputy ministers of the ministry that is now called community, sport and cultural development. “We need to go down there and re-establish ourselves in the new year, at which time we’ll be asking for this $7 million, very rapidly, for free,” Formosa said. “If it’s a no, then there’s no question what we’ll be doing in my mind. If it’s a maybe, I think we still need to start the process of looking at building, in my opinion, our own consolidated plant, because we can’t put our hopes out here anymore.”
Formosa also said he thinks the city should continue to explore upgrading the existing plants, although that would mean having two facilities operating instead of one. “We’ll see what the advisory committee’s thoughts are around that,” he said.
Murray Dobbin is a member of Powell River Water Watch, a group that was established to oppose co-treatment. “It’s always disappointing when a city like Powell River, that is in tough times, loses out on a grant,” he said. “For us at Water Watch, the tragedy is the city didn’t actually put forward an innovative project for which they might have received money.”
The fact that the city didn’t receive even a portion of the project’s cost suggests to him that the technical review must have been quite negative, Dobbin said. “We tried to tell the city that,” he said. “We tried to say this is a very risky project. We wasted a lot of money, a lot of staff time, a huge amount of public input on our part and it caused a lot of distress and suspicion amongst a lot of people, so at the end of that whole process, we’re back at square one. I just hope the new council is more open to input to citizens early on.”
Looking forward, Dobbin said the most important issue for Water Watch is that the city chooses a treatment method that is not an open ditch. “I think key to wherever it goes is that we put together a plan for a state-of-art sewage treatment system, rather than an oxidation ditch, which, no matter where it is, is going to cause problems,” he said. “We want a plant that actually enhances the environment and I don’t think you do that with an oxidation ditch.”
