They’ve been asked to help and they will, but solutions won’t come cheap.
Columbia Shuswap Regional District will ask residents of North Shuswap”s Anglemont Estates to vote on whether they want the regional district to take over operation of the subdivision’s ailing water system.
The aging Anglemont Water System has long been riddled with problems, including source, infrastructure and disinfection, and maintenance – problems the Water Management Branch of the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resources and Interior Health say must be dealt with now.
“The bottom line is the creek does not supply enough water for the existing 420 property owners let alone the almost 900 lots that have not yet been connected to the system,” says CSRD Water Services Co-ordinator Terry Langlois. “There’s lots of issues with it, but that’s the main one, and to deal with that the operators are shutting off portions of that subdivision weekly and daily, depending on water flow.”
Failure to get a $5.2 million grant from the province in late 2011 means owners of the subdivision’s 1,303 lots will have to bear a much higher financial burden in order to get clean, potable water.
If a majority of the property owners in Anglemont Estates accept CSRD’s offer, each one will pay a $650 per year parcel tax, $532 of which will go to debt repayment over a 25-year period.
As well, the 420 current owners, and anyone else who connects to the new water system, will pay an additional $700 yearly to cover the expenses of maintaining the system and putting part of it in reserves.
“We don’t impose our will, we’ve been asked to get involved,” Langlois says, of the current owners, who will be given the opportunity to yea or nay the proposal in a referendum, which will likely take place on the May long weekend. “This is what we can offer them and they will have the ultimate decision.”
Meanwhile, the company who has been operating the system will withdraw their services as of Feb. 15 and, with nobody else in sight, the problem utility will be turned over again to owner Terry Speed.
Rick Carew, secretary to the comptroller of the Water Management Branch, says the province took over operation of the Anglemont Estates water system Oct. 12, 2010 based on five defficencies:
• No financial statements for 2008-09
• No proposal to rectify the shortfall in the “replacement/reserve trust fund”
• No plan to clear up a shortfall in the replacement/reserve fund for the Acacia Water system (also owned by Speed)
• Lack of an acceptable rate increase application
• Lack of a financial plan that demonstrates how the utility will provide potable water after meeting criteria on bacterial allowance, as well as to provide sufficient quantity to meet current and future demands.
“Those are the five things that he was asked to do,” said Carew, who noted that having taken over management of the utility, the Water Management Branch was obligated to address those issues.
But while those issues have been addressed, low creek flow, higher than allowed bacterial rates and leaky infrastructure remain.
And the contractor hired by the province to carry out day-to-day operation of the water system did so on the basis it would be taken over by the regional district within 15 months.
Now that the process has been delayed by the lack of provincial funding, he asked the Water Management Branch to find someone else to take over.
“He owns other water systems and was spending too much time on this one,” Carew says. “The only one we could find who knows the system is Mr. Speed.”
Watch for more on this in next week’s newspaper.
