EDITORIAL: Report call sends wrong message
Email
Print
Letter to Editor
Share
Planning deadline, funding windows narrowing on CRD
It’s hard to imagine what the politicians planning Victoria’s sewage treatment system were thinking last week.
The Capital Regional District’s core-area liquid waste management committee asked CRD staff to prepare a report that would outline the steps needed - and the costs that might be incurred - if any of the eight municipalities involved wanted to walk away and start its own sewage utility.
Not one of the committee’s 13 members raised their hand to vote against receiving the report, though it seems to fly in the face of everything the committee is trying to achieve on an increasingly short timeline.
To date, two municipalities, Esquimalt and Colwood, have suggested they may leave the CRD process and start on their own path, if certain conditions aren’t met.
Both have their own municipal staff and if they were interested in such a report, the work should have fallen to them.
With a Dec. 31 deadline looming, the time left for the CRD to submit its business plan to the province is running short. CRD staff don’t need to be tasked with this extra piece of work.
But more crucially, the window for firm funding commitments from senior levels of government is closing as well.
Ottawa and the province have both promised to pay a third of the estimated $1.2-billion cost of building the system, but the CRD has nothing in writing from either.
Just before passing the motion, the committee heard a warning from chair Judy Brownoff that Ottawa is under mounting pressure from other cities to spend the money it has committed for infrastructure projects.
That money is contingent on the province committing its share, and we will learn whether that’s the case only with this week’s budget delivery.
It is a poor time to send the message that the CRD is willing to contemplate the dissolution of its own three-year-old planning process.
v2
