At times — and this is one of them — it appears the Capital Regional District is making up the sewage project as it goes along. While it is easy to sympathize with the elected and non-elected people who have to piece together this Frankenstein’s monster, it is also easy to share the frustration of those like Saanich director Leif Wergeland, who said Wednesday that “heads should roll” over the Viewfield Road debacle.
For the second time, the CRD has run away from a proposed sewage-plant site after spending millions of dollars to buy land. First it was Haro Woods in Saanich, at a cost of $6.5 million. Now it’s Viewfield Road in Esquimalt to the tune of $17 million.
The first time, outrage from Saanich residents led the district to drop the plan for a decentralized system of sewage treatment and extricate itself by swapping land with Saanich to create a park.
In Esquimalt, the CRD shelled out millions more than assessed value for the land on Viewfield Road in Esquimalt to build a biosolids plant. On Wednesday, the board bowed to weeks of angry opposition from Esquimalt residents and councillors. Viewfield is officially off the list, and the CRD has an expensive food warehouse on its books.
The planners’ sights have swivelled again to the Hartland landfill as a site for a biosolids plant, but already the nearby residents of Willis Point are rushing to the barricades. As one resident wrote in Thursday’s letters to the editor: “We are not wary, as reported — we are adamantly against the Hartland site.”
Perhaps the district is hoping it can steamroller over the sparsely inhabited Willis Point area — or sell the residents on the plan. The way it sold the residents of Saanich and Esquimalt.
At this stage, the CRD can’t even tell potential neighbours how the plant will work because the technology hasn’t been decided. It wants to digest and dry the sludge, but whether the region needs a larger facility to turn the waste into fuel, or whether it will opt for a smaller building to produce fertilizer, is still up in the air.
The unsightly and potentially smelly parts of the sewage project — the treatment plant and the biosolids plant — have to go somewhere, and no one wants them over the back fence. But CRD officials have gone through the exercise in Esquimalt in the apparent belief that they could persuade the locals to accept the plant through a combination of marketing and “amenities.”
They were wrong. It’s a sewage plant, and trying to put it in an area surrounded by houses and small businesses — even if you label the neighbourhood light industrial — is going to make people very angry.
The construction work will soon fade from memory. The pipes will be underground. The monthly bill will become a fact of life. The two plants, however, will be the face of sewage treatment for generations.
Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins thinks it’s time to hit the rewind button. She wants to see the CRD go back to everyone’s first choice: a site that will hold both plants in a less intrusive location. We have argued before that local and provincial governments should lean on the Department of National Defence to contribute more land near McLoughlin Point.
Even if that doesn’t work, there is room to re-think the location of the biosolids centre.
Before the CRD is faced with another embarrassing reversal — this time over the Hartland site — it needs to put a huge effort into finding a site that won’t send residents into the streets with tar and feathers.
