Greater Vernon Advisory Committee directors have approved a motion to hold a referendum this fall to borrow up to 70 million dollars for water projects. Three directors were opposed: Coldstream's Gyula Kiss and Maria Besso and Vernon's Bob Spiers, some with concerns that Interior Health is forcing the region to add filtration to its system, even though it's already good quality, and most of it is used for farming. Spiers told the committee, he would like to see Greater Vernon residents vote against it, to force I-H to come up with another funding solution. "If it was so important to be a safety concern, then why are we being allowed not to filter our main plant (Mission Hill) until 2022? It doesn't make sense," says Spiers. Kiss also recommends people vote against it. "80 percent of the water produced at Duteau will go to fields, and this is highly treated, filtered water. The cost of that can be up to 45 million dollars a year, just for the treatment," Kiss tells Kiss FM. Coldstream's Besso has issues with the direction of the master water plan. "One of the first steps is to build a 110 mega litre filtration plant at Duteau, and still only 6 mega litres in the summer peak will be for domestic use, and the other 104 will be put on (farming) fields," says Besso. The GVAC motion still has to be approved by the regional district board.
The most expensive project in the master water plan phase 1 is $26.5 million for adding filtration at the Duteau Creek water treatment plant for up to 110 mega litres a day. The other components are $19.5 million for Lavington system separation of the domestic and agriculture supply, $9.8 million for domestic system distribution investments, $6.4 milllion for raising the Aberdeen Dam by four meters, $3.5 million for twinning transmission main, and $2.6 million for an Okanagan Lake pump staiton.
Directors decided to take the issue to referendum in November after earlier rejecting a suggestion to hold an alternative approval process.
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Don Quixote Note: The original motion was to to go to an alternate approval process re the $70million borrowing. This was not agreed to by a vote with only 1 GVAC member feeling this was the best way to get approval. The next proposal was for a referendum for this $70 million and this included the $26.5 million Filtration option and I opposed this motion as I see no reason as to the timing or necessity of this item and cannot support borrowing for this item. At the very minimum it is my feeling that this amount should be cost shared in an a 1/3 grant from each of the federal and provincial Govt. and the local ratepayers. Furthermore the timing of adding Filtration in 2017 to the Duteau Creek plant (which services approx. 20% of our non ag. users) while delaying Filtration to the Mission Hills Plant until 2022 at a projected cost of $36,559,833 (which services approx. 80% of our non ag. users) baffles me.
A referendum rather than the alternate approval process is always the way to go but I feel that this referendum if it included Filtration is not one that I can support.
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| Original Agenda Item GVAC Feb 6 http://www.rdno.ca/agendas/140206_GVAC_AGN_AMD_FULL.pdf |
1 comment:
Let me make a slight correction! It's not $45 million It's $4 to $5 million a year for filtration. That would include the sum of the annual borrowing costs of the current DAF treatment plant ($29 million), the borrowing costs of the proposed filtration plant, the cost of DAF treatment and the cost of filtration and that would only provide about 20% of the total domestic water supply.
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