Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
Environmental advocacy group Ecology Ottawa has launched a letter-writing campaign to get local MPs onside with the Ottawa River Action Plan.
In an email sent to subscribers of their mailing list, the group is urging people to send a letter to Ottawa-area MPs so that the cleanup strategy gets adequate funding in the 2012 federal budget.
From the “action alert,” as Ecology Ottawa calls it:
City council would like to move forward with the next phase of the _Ottawa River Action Plan_—the construction of major combined sewage overflow (CSO) storage facilities. CSO storage facilities will lower the amount of contaminants released to the Ottawa River, improving the water quality and possibly reducing the number of beach closures. According to Ottawa Riverkeeper Meredith Brown, who has endorsed this letter-writing campaign, it is imperative that the city move ahead with the Ottawa River Action Plan, with or without federal support. “But,” says Brown, “the Ottawa River is a key feature of the National Capital Region. The federal government should be doing everything it can to stop the dumping of untreated sewage in the river that runs through the nation’s capital.”The form letter drafted by Ecology Ottawa asks whether MPs would support $50 million in funding being set aside for those storage facilities in the 2012 budget. The province has already said it will commit one-third of the costs of the $150-million project, the group says.
The campaign brings to mind this September 2011 exchange between Mayor Jim Watson and Ottawa West-Nepean MP John Baird, published on the weekend by Ottawa Sun municipal affairs reporter Jon Willing. In it, Baird says he would be willing to reallocate some of the city’s $600 million in light rail funding if the city’s “top priority” had changed to the Ottawa River.
Watson has said he won’t be going down that route. Which leads to this question, posed by our weekend news curator Peter Henderson:
The LRT project has been decades in the making, but Ottawa’s sewage problems have been around for at least a half-century. Can both issues be addressed within the current spending plans?The federal government has already given $33 million to help with the river’s overflow, but the city likely won’t be receiving further money until the next round of federal infrastructure spending in 2014.
According to Ecology Ottawa, the city discharged 417 million litres of sewage and rainwater into the river in 2011. That’s enough to fill 166—wait for it—Olympic-sized swimming pools. People may differ on whether LRT or the Ottawa River is the city’s main priority, but I think we can all agree it’s time to come up with a new gigantic unit of volume.