In the ongoing Greater Victoria sewage saga, there have been few opportunities for the wider community to hear from average citizens who are being asked to host the region’s treatment in their neighbourhood.
Seaterra has a significant PR budget and can easily tell their story, but it is equally important to hear the experiences of those who live in places such the Westbay, Saxe Point, Macaulay Point and other Esquimalt residential neighbourhoods near McLoughlin Point.
In the beginning, those of us who support sewage treatment (and we are the majority) were happy we would finally stop fouling our environment with our raw sewage. When residents and council put forward McLoughlin Point as the location of one of several modern plants in the Greater Victoria area, we felt we were part of a regional solution.
This changed abruptly about four years ago when the Capital Regional District unilaterally made the decision to build just one large traditional secondary sewage plant for the entire region’s waste on our small waterfront lot. Our feelings on this major change were not surprising — not only would we get a huge plant in our neighbourhood, but the CRD never bothered to ask us if that was OK.
Since that time, residents and our elected officials have tried to tell the CRD why this size and type of plant is not appropriate next to a residential neighbourhood at the entrance to our harbour, but the odds haven’t favoured our community.
Esquimalt has only one representative at the CRD, which means we are always outvoted. Sewage committee meetings are held during the day, which makes it difficult for working citizens to attend to express their concerns. Those who do speak have to face a little machine with three lights that go from green to yellow to red to make sure they only speak for the allotted three minutes. It isn’t a friendly place.
Attending one of the few CRD open houses held in the municipality was disheartening. Even when citizens resorted to protest tactics, the communication usually flowed only one way.
Add to this the repeated public threats directed to Esquimalt that we have no choices, since the CRD will ask the province to make us do whatever it wants anyway, and the warning that anyone who disagrees with doing this plan this way is wasting a lot of everyone else’s tax dollars. That second warning is so you know who to blame when the cost overruns start to mount.
The result of this dysfunctional process is what you see today: a stalled megaproject with virtually no local public support. Those of us who became involved because we cared about our neighbourhood have looked deeply into the entire project and have found bigger and more fundamental problems that are now being brought out into the open.
Esquimalt’s recent decision to refuse rezoning has been heavily criticized by other CRD board members as being detrimental to the good of the region. This is an old tune; it is not a coincidence that those with the least power and prestige are usually the ones that are asked to “take it for the team.”
Esquimalt is one of the most mixed residential areas in the capital region, with million-dollar houses down the street from low-cost rentals. It has beautiful hidden beaches, neighbourhoods filled with gardens, a wonderful walkable core. It has the industriousness of the dockyards and navy base, and a good mix of families, students and seniors. The small size of the district means that people know one another, and we take care of each other.
We are proud of our municipality, and after years of being ignored, outvoted, threatened, devalued and frankly, dumped on, we were finally asked at the 11th hour to officially rezone. We hope you understand why we cheered when council said no.
Meagan Klaassen of Esquimalt is co-chair of the Lyall Street Action Committee, a residents’ associations advocating for people directly affected by the sewage project.
