Editor:
To all my friends on the Sunshine Coast, this is your Comprehensive Regional Water Plan: https://www.scrd.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/2013-Comprehensive-Regional-Water-Plan.pdf
If you want to change the path forward on water, you need to change this plan.
This plan led us to where we are now, and it will continue in this way until this plan is updated and changed.
Regional water plans occur over decades. What’s outlined in this plan is two options: major investments vs. cost savings and scarcity.
The choice made in 2013 was not to increase taxes, and to deal with the scarcity and conservation requirements that ensue. It was a simple decision that the board at the time thought they understood.
This approach is clearly not working. In order to get to a better place, you’re looking at a minimum $100 million investment in storage, treatment, transmission, and conservation. It’s the whole system that needs upgrading, not just the storage. That means a significant tax increase, and a 10-year capital plan to get to a fix.
This plan outlined two different contrasting choices, but now you need to execute both of them at the same time.
My recommendation is to get involved and support the change. We’ve had enough anger and finger pointing about this. Most of the people getting trashed in the community were not there when these fundamental decisions were made. The people that are there now, need your help and support to make the change.
Fixing the water supply will be the biggest public capital program the region has ever seen: no board can undertake a project of this magnitude without overwhelming public support.
You can fix this, it will be hard, but it’s not impossible.
Noel Muller
Sechelt Councillor (2014-18)
