No Sympathy For Victoria

For decades, Victoria's sewage has been dumped into the ocean slightly offshore - raw and untreated. I'm sure that they must be the last major municipality in Canada which doesn't have a sewage treatment system in place. Even the ever-parsimonious Calgary has invested in sewage treatment - quite aggressively, actually.

Well, it seems that the Provincial Government in B.C. finally got its head around the fact that Victoria wasn't going to do anything on its own, so they ordered the city to take steps.

The cost of the project is now approaching $1.2 Billion, and homeowners are crying the blues about a levy that they will have to shell out to pay for the project:

"I question these figures," said Oak Bay Mayor Chris Causton, addressing the discrepancy between ratepayers in his municipality - who will pay the extra $713 a year - and the rest of the region. "I'm not convinced there's four times the flow coming from Oak Bay."

Mr. Causton said that despite the province's dictate, an environmental impact study hasn't even been done.

"I think there's a lot of residents that need to be convinced."

Too bad. The rest of us have been paying for our civic water and wastewater treatment for decades, pal. Victoria's been hemming and hawing over putting in a sewage treatment system for at least 20 odd years that I know of. Meanwhile, it continues to dump its raw sewage straight into the ocean. Like Calgary in so many ways, there's a huge amount of "NIMBY" happening, and now the price is steeper than a lot of residents are willing to pay. Had Victoria started this process in the 1980s, the basic project would have cost a fraction of the $1.2 Billion being discussed now.

Infrastructure is a "pay me now, or pay me later" proposition. Victoria chose "later", and now is obliged to pay with interest. Calgary went through a similar debacle with the south end of Deerfoot Trail. As new developments came in, developers were permitted to simply install traffic lights at intersection points on Deerfoot - turning a highway into a high speed parking lot. In the last five years, we've replaced all of the traffic lights with interchanges - at a cost several times what it would have cost had those interchanges been put in place when the new developments were being created.

Sewage treatment plants aren't pretty things, and few people ever "see" the benefit they deliver. Consequently, in the very "tourist centric" mindset in Victoria, such infrastructure gets pretty low billing for most people, and very few people understand just how much damage dropping raw sewage from 330,000 people into the ocean year after year really does.

Up to this point, I've been somewhat ambivalent to Victoria's waste water issues. However, when the issue is not that the plant needs to be built, but rather the fact that the residents of the city will have pay for it, just as the rest of us do, I lose what patience I do have. The politics have allowed this issue to languish for decades, and now the pigeons have come home to roost. Suck it up, and get on with the damn job.