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Editorial: Sewage clock is ticking

The capital region’s storm-battered sewage project threw some more crew members overboard on Friday. This time it was Seaterra manager Albert Sweetnam and his remaining staff who got the heave-ho.

The capital region’s storm-battered sewage project threw some more crew members overboard on Friday. This time it was Seaterra manager Albert Sweetnam and his remaining staff who got the heave-ho.

And just to underline the discontent, the King County, Washington, representative on the Seaterra Commission abandoned ship, saying the voyage is taking far too long.

Now the Capital Regional District and its core-area sewage committee have to hope that their new plan for getting the system built will work. With funding deadlines looming and the required completion dates visible further off on the horizon, there is no time for more mistakes.

While open houses and public surveys by the eastside and westside sewage committees attracted all the recent attention, Seaterra was sitting forgotten in the background. The Seaterra Commission was created as a body of experts to take many of the decisions on the project out of the political realm; its establishment was required by the provincial government. The commission turned management over to Sweetnam and a staff of professionals.

But since the plan to build a single sewage-treatment plant at McLoughlin Point ran into the brick wall of Esquimalt’s refusal in June 2014, Seaterra has had little to do. The 20-plus staff were cut to four, and Sweetnam continued earning his $290,000-a-year salary, which made him the highest-paid person on the CRD’s salary list.

That obviously couldn’t go on, so Sweetnam will leave at the end of September, taking with him indelible memories of Victoria politics and almost 500,000 of our tax dollars in severance pay.

While most of us are floored by the thought of such a settlement, we should keep in mind that hefty severance packages are standard in most contracts for highly paid executives. The time for taxpayers to object is before the wedding, not after the divorce.

Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps, who chairs the core-area liquid waste management committee, estimates that terminating Sweetnam now will save taxpayers $1.4 million.

There is no point in shovelling more money into an agency that has no hope of fulfilling its mandate. Since June of last year, it has cost $847,000 to maintain the rump of Seaterra.

Even the Seaterra name is gone, replaced by the less-lyrical “core area wastewater treatment program commission.”

After the public drubbing that followed the fight over McLoughlin Point and the abortive effort to put a biosolids plant on Viewfield Road in Esquimalt, the CRD has placed all its hopes in the new process, with westside and eastside committees committed to extensive public consultation. Those committees, and the main CRD committee, say they are optimistic that they can meet deadlines despite having to cram enormous amounts of work into about a year.

Remember that we have been working on this for nine years. Pam Elardo certainly does. She was the representative of King County, Washington, on the Seaterra Commission, until she handed in her resignation on July 23.

Our neighbours have been pushing Victoria for years to stop pumping sewage into our shared waters, so having an American representative was an important sign of our commitment. Elardo had high praise for Sweetnam and his professionalism, but fears that the CRD’s new process could put completion decades away.

“I and King County leadership have lost confidence that the current approach will this time be successful. We are concerned that there will be yet another failed process,” she wrote.

That’s a vote of non-confidence that we have to take seriously.

Tossing Seaterra over the rail makes sense, but now the CRD has to make sure the ship reaches its destination in time.