It would cost the City of White Rock $27 million over the next decade to join the Greater Vancouver Water District, according to a recently released report on the option, which the mayor said this week is not “off the table” just yet.
The April 23, 2013 report – released publicly by Metro Vancouver on Friday – outlines the costs, infrastructure and time frame associated with White Rock joining the GVWD. The report was requested by the city in March of that year, a month after council voted to explore purchasing the water utility from Epcor.
Because the report had been the subject of in-camera discussions at Metro Vancouver, it was kept confidential until White Rock made a formal request Nov. 27 for the information to be made public, the same day Peace Arch News published a news article about residents seeking the projected cost details.
The estimated $27-million cost outlined in the report comprises $12 million in capital costs – additional facilities required include a pump station adjacent to the Sunnyside Reservoir, the closest GVWD reservoir to White Rock, and approximately three kilometres of water main.
Incremental costs to the city – to pay for upgrades required to GVWD facilities as a result of the “additional demands” of having White Rock connected – were estimated to be $13.1 million over a nine-year period.
The report estimates a cost of $2 million for the city to twin the water-main connections to “increase system resiliency” and projected the process would take two to three years.
While Mayor Wayne Baldwin described the option as “not a good alternative cost-wise,” he said the city has not dismissed the possibility of joining the GVWD.
“Nothing is off the table yet,” Baldwin told PAN Monday. “We’re still looking at all the numbers and so on.”
Baldwin reiterated that the “simplistic notion” of the city using the region’s water supply was anything but a “simple solution.”
“A lot of people had this notion that you would just have to run a pipe across 16th, you’d just tap into it and it can be done in a couple of days,” he said. “It’s a lot of money, and it’s a big project. It’s not that simple.”
When asked how the cost of joining the GVWD compared with how much the city will be spending on purchasing the utility from Epcor – the purchase price is still under negotiation – Baldwin said “it really doesn’t have a huge amount to do with the Epcor purchase.”
“Part of the reason why (the report) was in-camera was we didn’t want to give away any information to Epcor that would have helped them in the bargaining,” Baldwin said.
In Epcor’s 2014 Arsenic and Manganese Risk Management Plan, prepared for Fraser Health, the report outlines joining the GVWD as an alternative to investing in arsenic and manganese treatment. Epcor estimated the capital costs – not including costs incurred to Metro Vancouver or the cost of purchasing water – to be $23 million, and determined the option to be “significantly more costly” than upgrades to the existing system.
When asked why the city’s report was kept confidential if Epcor had explored the same option, Baldwin said joining the GVWD “wasn’t something that was possible for (Epcor).”
“As a private corporation, they would not have been allowed to join the GVWD,” he said.
(A process is in place for non-Metro Vancouver municipalities to join the GVWD; Point Roberts and the University Endowment Lands both have water-purchase agreements in place with the region.)
City manager Dan Bottrill – in response to queries about how the projected GVWD costs would compare to costs incurred by the purchase of the water utility from Epcor – told PAN the GVWD option could not be considered until the utility was owned by the city.
“When we talked last spring about whether we should be expropriating the utility, a lot of people were saying we should be joining Metro. But we didn’t have that control,” Bottrill said. “For the city to… join Metro, first we needed to acquire the utility. The water could be coming from Metro, but where was it going to go? We didn’t own the distribution system.”
Baldwin said the city is now looking at options to address the high arsenic and manganese levels in the water supply, and will be hosting a community open house March 2, at 5:30 p.m. at the White Rock Community Centre (15154 Russell Ave.) to outline those options.
“We’ll be presenting information about what potential processes would be and what the options are,” Baldwin said. “For example, instead of spending $10 million on arsenic and manganese removal, we could spend $27 million and join the GVWD. It seems like an obvious choice to me, but it may not be so obvious.”
