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City council wants to promote the safety and deliciousness of Ottawa’s municipal water supply, just not by serving it at cultural festivals, sports competitions and other outdoor events.
Mere days before the start of “Drinking Water Week in Ottawa,” council voted down a $100,000 pilot project to buy a water tanker and truck to bring city water to local events this summer.
Instead, it left the door open for the purchase of water trailers if the city can find a corporate sponsor for the program. It’s unclear how this would work, especially since the point of purchasing the water trucks was to advocate for the city’s water supply and not corporate sponsors.
Debate on the issue lasted for hours and became quite heated. Alta Vista Councillor Peter Hume compared the water trucks to the city’s own parade float — a float he said he had ridden on while waving to voters.
“The difference is that one’s for politicians and the other one’s for water,” Hume said.
Ottawa residents go through about 30 million plastic water bottles a year, and it’s estimated half of them end up in landfills instead of recycling. Kanata South Councillor Peggy Feltmate asked council to think about the landfill issues and the “horrible picture” of plastic refuse swirling around in the ocean.
“Do we really want to be part of that?” she asked.
However, other councillors said that, while they supported advocating Ottawa’s drinking water, this issue was a “nice to have” as opposed to a “must have.”
Instead, the city should be educating residents on the quality of its drinking water at a much lower cost. Innes Councillor Rainer Bloess said he discussed “Drinking Water Week” on a radio station for 10 minutes, which “cost nothing.”
Also, the public will be able to tour the Britannia Water Purification Plant.
If it had passed, the pilot project would have been similar to Toronto’s HTO to Go program. Toronto has two mobile water trailers fitted with 10 drinking taps and 10 spigots for filling up water bottles. The tankers are provided free of charge at public events.
The program put forward by City of Ottawa staff also called for two water trailers at a cost of about $200,000: $120,000 for the trucks and water tankers, plus operating costs.
However, when it looked as if some councillors were balking at the price tag, Kanata North Councillor Marianne Wilkinson proposed a motion to limit the pilot project to one truck, with a report on its success to be reviewed next year.
That motion failed on a 12-8 vote.
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