The Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) board deferred a motion on Chapman Lake drawdown last week after directors couldn’t agree on the intent of the motion and senior staff warned it could reopen “the whole comprehensive regional water plan process.”
The motion — passed as a recommendation at the Sept. 4 infrastructure services committee meeting — directed staff to address concerns from environmentalists in a forthcoming consultants’ report presenting options for Chapman Lake drawdown.
The concerns were raised by George Smith of the Tetrahedron Alliance and Jason Herz, chair of the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association, on behalf of their groups at the Sept. 4 meeting. In a 45-minute presentation attended by about 40 members of both groups, Smith and Herz urged the board to scrap any plans to draw down the level of Chapman Lake and find other ways to supplement the regional water supply.
Flagging the recommendation at the Sept. 11 board meeting, West Howe Sound director Lee Turnbull said she thought the motion was “way too vague.”
“The concern of the group was that this idea keeps coming back,” Turnbull said. “This recommendation does not say anything about getting it off the table.”
District of Sechelt director Darnelda Siegers suggested the motion direct staff to incorporate the delegation’s ideas into the consultants’ report “as part of some of the potential solutions.”
Bryan Shoji, general manager of infrastructure services, said the Opus DaytonKnight report now in progress is looking at options to draw down the lake by three metres.
“It’s not looking at not the option to draw down the lake three metres,” Shoji said.
His understanding of the recommendation, he said, was to take the concerns from the two groups “and somehow address them” in the report.
“What I’m struggling with is we went through a whole process to develop a comprehensive regional water plan and that’s where that question was asked. And there was a lot of feedback on both sides, and the board adopted the option of drawing down the lake by three metres in the interim and looking at the long-term solution of constructing an engineered lake.”
If the board was looking at revisiting the question of drawdown, he said, “then we’re opening up the whole comprehensive regional water plan process.”
In the debate that followed, Siegers said she wanted staff to continue working on the plan, but by looking at the groups’ ideas “to conserve what we have and stretch what we have … perhaps we don’t have to draw down three metres.”
Roberts Creek director Donna Shugar said she had asked during the Sept. 4 presentation for “what’s involved in doing the appropriate analysis of the impact” of drawing down the lake.
“The presenters had quite a lot to say. I didn’t see the backing for the statements — I’m not saying there isn’t any, at all. I just need to have that information,” Shugar said.
“I would not want to proceed with the drawdown,” she added, “unless I knew that there would not be deleterious impacts that would be worse than another situation.”
Turnbull said the drawdown option was only one part of the plan and had to be reconsidered in light of the new information that came forward.
“To think of it as ‘the’ option when there’s so much resistance to it and so many factors, to me is ridiculous,” she said.
At that point, Elphin-stone director Lorne Lewis made a motion to defer the issue to the next infrastructure services committee meeting.
“This debate does not belong here,” Lewis said, and the motion to defer carried.
The next infrastructure services committee meeting is set for Oct. 2.
