No Wonder They're Dragging Their Heels

Numerous discussions have been held by the public on what is Greater Vernon doing or planning now that the referendum for borrowing $70 million to fund capital projects for the 2012 Master Water Plan has failed.

Water customers wondered about the appointed laypeople (no independent consultant) Stakeholders' Advisory Committee (to the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee) that would meet once a month for a few hours, provide their "recommendation(s)" to GVAC sometime in March of 2016.

But what was happening behind closed GVW doors in the meantime?

Wonder no more.

It seems that stalling has its benefits...

The following is a cut-n-paste from Technical Memorandum #9, System Separation Option Analysis, specifically page 68 of 90 from the RDNO website's Master Water Plan.

"Should the referendum fail, then RDNO would have to wait for an order from Interior Health to proceed with the plan as approved.

RDNO would then be required to process the required loan authorization bylaws (approximately six (6) months) to authorize construction to proceed."

The above (highlighted text) were items 5 and 6 on page 68 of the 90 page document.

Here are items 1 through 4.

 

Read the rest:

 

The Technical Committee Option Review Workshop resulted in the decision to recommend Option 2 based on a review of 9 different conceptual long term water supply solutions. The key components associated with Option 2 are: 

1. Continue to use Duteau Creek and KalamalkaLake as the principal raw water sources;

2. Add new filtration plants at the existing Duteau Creek and Mission Hill treatment sites;

3. Complete system separation in the West Goose Lake area and the Lavington/Coldstream service areas and;

4. The development of a dedicated raw water supply for Goose Lake to reduce the volume of treated potable water utilized for irrigation. 

Political direction has been provided to amend Option 2 to incorporate an oversizing of the transmission mains from Duteau Creek in the Lavington / Coldstream area. This will allow for complete system separation in the East Vernon area in the future, and raw water supply to Goose Lake. 

It is recognized that implementation of the Master Water Plan as presented will be difficult for the following reasons:

1. We are currently in mid-2013 and the projects scheduled for 2013 will not be undertaken due to timing and funding availability. 

2. To fund the first phase of projects to 2017, RDNO will need to borrow approximately $60 million.  This will require a referendum and realistically speaking the timing to go through this process will result in the referendum occurring in 2014. 

3. The Lavington separation projects would then have to be rescheduled from 2015 to 2019 at the earliest. 

4. The upgrading of the Duteau Creek WTP will then be pushed back, with pre-design and design in2016 and construction in 2017-2018 at the earliest.

(the blog highlighted text were items 5 and 6).

Stalling.

"...stalling so that GVW can create bylaws to borrow the money for each capital project," says Kia.

Because borrowing for each capital project doesn't require a referendum...only the entire Master Water Plan's capital projects required a referendum.

No wonder the majority of elected officials (on GVAC) aren't supporting an independent consultant review of the MWP..."political direction has been provided".