Re: “Red tape stifles possible solution,” editorial, June 13.
The editorial criticizes so-called red tape that might impede a Macaulay Point sewage-plant option.
However, the biggest part of this red-tape barrier is that the Capital Regional District would have to complete an environmental-impact assessment on the Macaulay land, which it doesn’t have to do with privately owned land at the McLoughlin, Hartland or Viewfield site options.
Its shocking that this whole sewage plan has been plunging ahead since 2006 without an independent environmental-impact assessment under provincial or federal legislation.
CRD residents should demand to know why the CRD has rejected calls for such an assessment. Siting a sewage sludge plant with a huge thermophilic anaerobic bio-digester in a residential Esquimalt-Vic West neighbourhood is hazardous, but neither a serious environmental nor a health impact assessment will be done.
Why didn’t the editorial also address the Agriculture Land Reserve red tape that apparently impedes the CRD from considering an option for siting the whole sewage and sludge plant complex at the safer location on Burnside Road?
CRD residents need to carefully consider where this sewage and sludge plant project is leading them and to actually demand more red tape, if it can save us from a massive mistake.
John Newcomb
Saanich
