It is time to ask for the auditor general’s help with our sewage-treatment impasse. Since the province has a large financial stake in the project, the legislature could justify seconding the AG.
I suggest four specific grounds for an appeal:
1. The Capital Regional District’s plan and the two rival plans are not directly comparable. One of the rivals has added solid-waste gasification and the other still argues for ocean dumping.
2. The CRD has never given the details of its $783-million cost estimate. Curiously, the estimate didn’t change even when major elements came and went — biosolids treatment at Viewfield, for example, or the sludge pipeline to Hartland.
3. A distributed alternative has never been properly considered. The February 2009 study that priced such a system at up to $2 billion simply added the cost of 10 distributed plants to the CRD’s $783-million figure, even though the latter included mega-plants at Clover and McLoughlin/Macaulay Points for which the 10 new plants would have been largely substitutes.
4. The CRD changes its mind with maddening frequency. During last June’s open houses, the senior engineer gave assurances of demand from utilities for methane and from agriculturists for de-watered sludge. Now methane has been hushed, and the CRD has forbidden the farmland use of sludge that it formerly championed.
Only the auditor general can face down the gang that can’t shoot straight and show us the way to the OK Corral.
David Bodenberg
Victoria
