Plan to move JUB outfall an eco-turkey
Dear mayors, councillors, CVRD directors, MLAs, and MP Alistair MacGregor:
It’s great to see costly downstream thinking is alive and well in Cowichan.
Our Joint Utilities Board’s $42-million plan to move our sewage outfall into Satellite Channel stinks, bluntly.
Surely that hefty kind of taxpayer cash could fund a land-based water purification plant to transform our sewage lagoons’ wastewater into potable drinking water, thereby negating any outfall-movement plans — and serving as a showpiece for other communities.
The potential outfall move will also annually pump millions of gallons of wastewater — treated to tertiary levels at best — into ocean waters now targeted for a new federal marine park in our endangered, salmon-bearing Salish Sea.
So much for our environmental policies espoused by Cowichan’s three levels of government. Sadly, those policies can be called greenwash if this needless outfall plan proceeds.
At the very least, our looming giant expenditure should go to local referendum the same way spending on our new RCMP detachment facility did recently.
Please shelve this shortsighted eco-turkey now and give us the long-term green leadership for which you are elected and paid.
Peter W. Rusland,
Duncan, (North Cowichan)
