Editor:
I came to the Sunshine Coast in 1992 and was immediately embroiled in the Chapman Creek protection Park issue. Chapman system was purported to provide clean drinking water to the Sunshine Coast for more than 50,000 residences. Well, there are only, I’m told, fewer than 25,000 taxpayers drawing that water, and we have run out of Chapman water too many times in the last 15 years. Several attempts were made to increase the capacity of water stored in the lake by raising the dam height to no end. It’s a park and the trees will die!
Politicians with no professional qualifications managed to cajole the SCRD into doing nothing.
The taxpayer faced increasing water costs and paid for no change in the system and, no long-term action plan except to conserve. Yet when you look at the water licences the SCRD has on the Coast, there is plenty of water available! Still, no long-term plan as our local governments spend money planning an emergency warning system to tell residents, there is no water.
The time has long passed the point where the SC has increasingly become a target of urban expansion out of Vancouver. Having no potable water will not stop them! It’s time for taxpayers to wake up and change what we have annually failed to do for 15 years. Set up an independent professional water management board, free of politicians who manipulate the gatekeepers. Charge them with making a short and long-term plan for 100 years for water. Or, the new residents will petition the government to do it for you.
Kevin W Davie, Salmon Arm
