A new waterline is being installed in the Kemp Lake district outside Sooke.
The short story is that 302 folks living in the area were saddled with a $2-million bill to update the water quality because Island Health mandated that we shouldn’t be drinking the water.
There wasn’t a general mailout to the people affected; we were told that we should have been aware of this vote by reading the local paper or being signed on to the Kemp Lake water email service.
I was told that there were two community meetings, which 18 and 35 people attended, which in my mind would indicate that they didn’t advertise the problem appropriately.
All this is bad enough, but the really despicable part of this is that Capital Regional District is going to charge us $2.50 per cubic metre (the same charges that breweries and other for-profit businesses are charged) when Sooke and the rest of the area are charged $1.93 to $2.07 for the same amount of water. Apparently, the provincial and federal governments do not offer grants to pay for updates like this. So 300-plus people have taken a $2-million loan at five per cent over 25 years, increasing our water taxes by 400 to 500 per cent.
Sheldon McCurdy
Sooke
