Sechelt councillor Doug Wright delivered a blunt assessment of the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) water strategy at a Nov. 22 committee meeting, calling it “out to lunch.”
The public meeting included the same SCRD officials who briefed local government representatives the day before in a closed-door session on the Comprehensive Regional Water Plan.
The SCRD supplies water to about 5,300 properties in Sechelt.
The 25-year plan, adopted by the SCRD in 2013, has four main strategies: universal metering and conservation; the Chapman Lake expansion; finding new sources; and finding storage.
The SCRD hopes to double the accessible water supply through a reduction in demand, fixing leaks in the system, and tapping into new sources. The estimated cost of implementing all the measures in the plan was pegged at $36.3 million.
Metering is already complete or nearing completion in all the rural areas and should begin in Sechelt next year. The next phase in the search for new sources will go to budget in 2018, with four sites identified for test wells. The search for a site for an engineered lake, or reservoir, is also a 2018 budget proposal.
Mayor Bruce Milne, who was recently appointed SCRD chair, said he wants to see a sense of urgency on the water question.
“I’d like to see a recognition that [the supply] is inadequate and therefore we have a sense of urgency, that we haven’t seen in the last few years, to try to meet that supply,” Milne said.
He also said he doesn’t think deepening the outlet from Chapman Lake in Tetrahedron Provincial Park to draw more water in times of drought is likely to get the necessary approvals.
“I’ve been studying political culture in this province since I was in my 20s, and my call on getting an act of legislation that redraws the boundaries of any Class A park in the province is a lot less than 50 per cent,” he said.
“It’s probably a snowflake’s chance in hell.”
Milne said it’s time to focus on moving forward with the engineered lake and search for new sources to ensure all water users can be supplied at Stage 2 levels throughout the year.
“We’ve missed our supply needs in three of the last five years, and I don’t see anything in the plan that tells me we’re going to reach them in the next three or four. That leaves me finding it very difficult to support the plan,” he said.
Wright, who was Sechelt’s representative on the SCRD board earlier in the term, also keyed on the need for a sense of urgency.
“Other than water meters, I see very little results in terms of additional water volume available to the Sunshine Coast,” Wright said.
“If you were running a private business with this kind of service and you had 50 per cent of your customers who were unhappy, you’d be out of business.”
SCRD officials at the meeting said while the Regional Water Strategy was based on two per cent growth per year, recent growth has actually been around one per cent. Sechelt planning staff, however, said that within the district the growth has exceeded two per cent.
Coun. Noel Muller, who chairs Sechelt’s planning committee, said there are about 2,000 properties awaiting zoning and other approvals that will need to be hooked up to the water system.
“Each time we send a referral to the SCRD it comes back that there’s adequate water and that we’ll be connected,” Muller said. “That scale – is that something that’s been considered?”
Sechelt councillors also had questions about the search for a reservoir location and the approval process.
SCRD chief administrative officer Janette Loveys said the regional district will need a storage permit and diversion licence under the Water Sustainability Act, and that requires tenure on the land where a reservoir is built.
“This will be a little bit of new territory for us, but we have developed some good relationships at a staff level with the people that would actually be responsible for those authorizations, and they have been providing some guidance on what that process would look like,” Loveys said.
When the public was given a chance for questions, several people came forward with their own ideas for dealing with the supply issue, such as tapping into Clowhom Lake and damming Chapman Lake to raise the water levels.
Lynn Chapman, well known on the Coast for her work on environmental issues, said Chapman Lake shouldn’t be touched.
“That’s a rabbit hole that the regional district has tried to go down for a long time. It’s a waste of time. It’s wasted a whole bunch of effort and thought,” she said. “We have a park. We need water. We don’t need to confuse those two issues. We need to protect the ecological integrity of Chapman Lake.”
One woman drew a round of applause when she said political leaders shouldn’t be shy about asking Coasters to absorb a big tax increase to upgrade the water system.
“Do that, make us pay, and do something really good and really proper and get it over with,” she said.
The committee did not make any specific recommendations.
The SCRD’s 2018 budget meetings were set to start Nov. 30.
