After years of conflict and opposition, culminating in a bitter election campaign, co-treatment, the proposal to treat City of Powell River’s sewage at Catalyst Paper Corporation’s Powell River division, appears to have died from lack of funding.
The city had pinned its hopes on its $7.2 million grant application to the Innovations Fund, a program administered by UBCM (Union of BC Municipalities). Elected officials who championed the proposal have often said co-treatment would only proceed if the city’s grant application was successful. It was the last condition on council’s motion to proceed with “phased consolidated treatment,” which combined co-treatment with a stand-alone facility that would treat sewage from Westview, Townsite and Cranberry.
Co-treatment has received much attention and resources over the last three years. The province gave the city $150,000 to pay for some of the costs associated with determining whether it was viable or not. The city has invested time and money into the process as well. A final accounting should be made in the days ahead.
If co-treatment is dead, elected officials and staff will have to regroup and start formulating next steps for the liquid waste management plan (LWMP). The city has been in the process since 1998, when council-of-the-day passed a resolution to complete an LWMP. Thirteen years later, Powell River still has a touted “state-of-the-art” treatment facility in Westview, that has never been able to meet its permit requirements, and an aging facility in Townsite from which sewage sludge is routinely discharged into the Strait of Georgia.
The main reason for advancing co-treatment was to save money, according to those elected officials who advocated for it. Without the funding to pay for connecting to Catalyst’s facility, the city will have to examine other solutions and their costs. Many ideas have been discussed during the last three years when co-treatment was on the table. If it is off, those other ideas, many of them innovative, will be examined.
Deciding which solution is best for Powell River will take some time, which may be beneficial to the city, as the federal government has hinted it is looking at making funds for municipal infrastructure available sometime in the future. Powell River’s situation is not unique. Many local governments across the country face the same challenges: how to fund projects to replace and upgrade aging infrastructure.
As 2012 begins, LWMP will be on the list of problems that need a solution, one of many elected officials will have to grapple with in the future.
