John Herbert is a member of the CRD Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee representing Oak Bay Municipality. On June 2nd 2009 the CALWMC discussed the staff report that recommended that the planning for land based treatment proceed based three to four sewage treatment Plants. The staff report can be viewed at:
Mr Herbert provided RSTV with his full comments made to the committee.
"I still have not seen any evidence that justifies the expenditure of this large amount of money. It is still unclear that it will make anything better and I have a bigger fear that it will make things worse perhaps much worse. The amount of electric power we will use will be enormous and who knows what we will do to the environment.
Every time there has been a presentation on the subject I have attempted to attend and I have read most of what has been written. What I have learned is that the tidal water off Victoria is one of the few places in the world where the ocean does a better job of treating sewage than we will ever do on shore.
It is a huge amount of money and when you think of the good that could be done if it was spent on some things that are needed it is a bit sad. We will spend this money and the overflows around the water front will still occur.
Families in the region will be forced to forgo important expenditures for their families. The infrastructure of the region which is suffering will be ignored and further degraded and new worthy projects will not happen.
I heard a presenter the other day say she felt disenfranchised and so do I. We are not allowed to deal with the real question but are being told what we are to do.
My preference would be to tell the province- no- we are not going to do this. If you want to go ahead do it on your own. However, I assume no one has that kind of courage and so we must go on.
We have been presented with what I will call the streamlined version and I want to discuss it a bit.
It proposes that we keep the cost of plants low by building fewer of them, by staging and by using the Mcloughlin site. This allows us to keep our options open as to what we do to the west.
It suggests that we delay the Clover Point wet weather plant. To spend 140 million for something that may run 100 hours a year and where all the municipalities involved are working hard to resolve the inflow problem would be lunacy.
I have listened to the endless discussions about resource recovery and I see no evidence that there is currently any market for most of what can be produced and I strongly feel that we would be irresponsible to provide any recovered resources unless there is a positive business case. I make this obvious statement because there appears to be a lot of “lets do it so we can feel good” stuff going on. I have no problem with people doing that with their own money but not the taxpayers’ money.
The streamlined proposal suggests that we defer most of the proposed resource recovery ideas until there is a market and a positive business case. Deferring it has the added advantage of being able to provide and install the state of the art recovery equipment if and when markets develop.
I support the streamlined option for about $940 million recognizing the cost is only an estimate and subject to several conditions.
In proposing we proceed with that option I think it is important that we design the plants in a way that resource recovery functions can be added when and if required and minimal cost .
I also think that if actual estimates come in either much higher or much lower we need to revisit these proposals.
We still do not have a realistic proposal for sludge and we need to develop one before we proceed. I understand that we have not figured out how to handle the sludge from the peninsula plant which shows there will be problems.
Finally we need to make any recommendation we send forward “Subject to the 2 senior Governments sharing 66 2/3% of the cost”. We need to do this from day one to make clear that if we do get sharing we can not do this time frame or to this level of design. It is not clear that the senior governments have any intention of funding 2 times dry weather flow and if they do not then we need to redesign to build what they are prepared to share."