North Pender Island trustees are asking the Capital Regional District to stop work on dismantling a dam and draining a pond that has been at the centre of decades of debate.
Preparations to drain Gardom Pond of more than 80 per cent of its water began in early June, raising concerns among residents, who say the pond is a valuable firefighting resource and draining it might affect the ability to draw water from nearby wells. The CRD has said the dam poses a risk to residents who live downstream, and needs to be reinforced or decommissioned.
At a meeting of the North Pender Island Local Trust Committee, a motion passed unanimously to have the committee’s chairwoman, Laura Patrick, formally request that the CRD stop construction. The motion asks the CRD to commit to public consultation and in-depth study of the pond’s impact on the island’s largest aquifer.
North Pender trustee Ben McConchie said the trust wants to know what it would cost to repair the dam, and how surrounding wells and the aquifer below the pond would be affected by its draining.
He said the trust has consulted a lawyer for legal advice on how to stop the project. Funds are being raised to pay legal fees.
“If they’re not into following our request from the local trust committee, then we’ll have to look into legal options to put a stop-work order on,” McConchie said.
West Coast Environmental Law is providing a small grant to help the community hire a lawyer who can identify legal options to stop the work.
Erica Stahl, program director of the organization’s environmental legal-aid fund, said the law-reform organization provides grants when a significant number of people have a genuine concern about an environmental issue. Stahl said cases that involve aquifers and ground surface water are a high priority for grants.
Responsibility to pay for work on the dam rests with the pond’s six water-licence holders — four of whom are retirees whose homes border the pond. The CRD and the developer of the subdivision next to the pond are also licence holders.
Terry Chantler is a licence holder who has said he had no choice but to agree to decommission the dam, because he couldn’t afford his share of the cost to reinforce it, estimated at $250,000. The total cost, divided among six licence holders, was estimated at $1.5 million several years ago. Chantler said that estimate is inflated, and multiple experts have assessed the dam informally and concluded it would be possible to remediate it for far less.
Last November, the CRD secured $491,000 in federal funding to decommission the dam, but the money cannot go toward reinforcement.
Ken Hancock, who was the CRD electoral area director for the Southern Gulf Islands from 2008 to 2011, said he disagreed with the CRD’s decision to hold all six licence holders equally liable.
“It was just fundamentally unfair for the regional government to treat a retired pensioner in a cottage as an equal stakeholder as far as financial liability,” Hancock said.
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