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The City of Kingston recently spent $115 million upgrading its Ravensview Water Pollution Control Plant.
It was the largest single capital project ever undertaken by the city and though the new facility is state of the art, like many others in communities across Ontario, it will pump water through ancient arteries.
Utilities Kingston President and CEO Jim Keech estimates a third of all treated water from both plants leaks and disappears into the ground before it gets to consumer taps.
“That’s not the exact number but I would say about 30 per cent,” Keech told Osprey News. Keech appreciates the irony that Kingston, like many other Ontario communities, preaches residential conservation and even restricts lawn watering from June through September while a third of its water dribbles through cracks in the system.
As part of a broader 10-year capital plan, Utilities Kingston is spending $10,000 to survey about a third of the city to see what can and needs to be done about the network of underground pipes.
However, without dedicated funds from senior levels of government, or dramatically higher user fees, the city will have to continue dealing with pipe replacement on a measured basis, which means fixing breaks caused by age or weather conditions and gradually replacing the oldest pipes.
A third to half of all Ontario’s clean, treated drinking water leaks into the ground before it ever gets to people’s taps. Estimates on the work needed to upgrade the province’s network of underground water pipes range from $11 billion to $18 billion, figures that are growing because of decades of government neglect.
Not that things have to be this way. Kingston’s approach, the model the city uses to run its utilities, so impressed members of a provincially appointed panel struck to study Ontario’s water infrastructure problems they suggested other municipalities consider adopting the city’s utility structure.
But such diligence comes with a price. While the provincial government is in the process of making it mandatory for water systems to fully recover costs from consumers through water bills, Kingston has been doing just that since the late 1990s.
As a consequence to moving to a stricter user-pay system, water bills in the city have increased substantially.
“In some areas, we’ve had rate increases of 70 per cent over a five-year period,” Keech said.
Kingston, like every other municipality in the province, also has been required to conform to a number of new laws, inspections and regulations governing water and sewage since Walkerton, which have significantly increased the cost of water. These have not necessarily led to safer water.
Kingston spent another $10 million post Walkerton, not specifically to address “significant” water quality issues, but to ensure Kingston’s two water treatment plants conform to new regulations.
“Our inspection reports went from a couple of pages to a book of 100 pages,” Keech said citing one example.
“A lot of the regulations they are bringing out are just paperwork and paper shuffling. It’s expensive and at end of the day it’s of absolutely no benefit to the customer.”
Kingston is not alone in this view. Several municipalities contacted by Osprey News expressed concern over the cost and effectiveness of post Walkerton regulatory change.
When the province tightened up water plant inspections in 2003, the environment ministry hired dozens of new inspectors to carry out the work since it was impossible to find the numbers of experienced engineers needed.
So instead, the ministry hired young people as qualified as possible and trained them.
Municipal officials say the combination of inexperience and post Walkerton zealotry, both in the ministry and by its inspectors, led to expensive and at times needless work.
“The intent of the regulations was pushed so far that it caused a lot of grief for the municipalities,” said Abdul Khan, director of water and wastewater treatment with Hamilton’s public works department
Green inspectors insisted on adherence to the letter of new regulations, even when they didn’t understand the implications of what that meant.
After three or four years of inspections and turnover, the initial “frenzy” has slowed down and inspectors now are experienced.
However, what happened flew in the face of Justice O’Connor’s recommendations from the Walkerton inquiry – both on inspector training and against taking a bureaucratic, regulatory approach to dealing with water treatment.
Dr. Steve Hrudy was an expert member on O’Connor’s commission. He told Osprey News the regulatory approach Ontario is taking flies in the face of O’Connor’s central recommendations.
“There’s more emphasis on penalties and ability to enforce them perhaps than there needs to be in ensuring good practice,” he said.
While many of O’Connor’s recommendations have been acted upon, the spirit of the report has been misconstrued.
Instead of creating a better system, the emphasis has been on creating a costly new bureaucracy.
“A careful reading of the inquiry report did set a context and some priorities in terms of what the overall direction should be and the emphasis was on putting in place systems that ensure competence,” Hrudy said.
“It seems to me the things that happened first were the lawyers drafting regulations that simply specified specific criteria and penalties,” Hrudy said.
“I’m certainly disappointed in that,” he said. The pursuit of bureaucracy and regulatory zero-tolerance over quality management poses a risk that Ontario will pour billions of dollars into an unsustainable water and sewage system. Worse, smaller communities may be susceptible to the kind of human error that led to Walkerton. “A regulatory program without adequate support and means for providing capacity is not going to be successful,” Hrudy said.
“To simply regulate without putting in place the appropriate means of support and facilitating the ways that smaller communities can deal with the problem is not helpful.”
Harry Swain, who headed up the Watertight advisory panel, said Ontario is not looking at alternatives – innovative or less expensive ways to provide water and sewage service or even to extend the life of pipes.
“Sometimes you can line an existing or worn-out pipe with a new vinyl or rubber line and get another 20 or 30 years out of it,” Swain said.
David Caplan, Ontario’s minister of public infrastructure renewal, is acutely aware of the need for more money to invest in water and sewer systems and the political will to get that done.
Water and sewage infrastructure increasingly is “under the radar” both in government and the public, Caplan said.
Watertight proposes and Caplan appears to support recommendations that will create large, regional water utilities across the province – merging multiple, small utilities together that will share costs and expertise.
It will require substantially higher water rates to pay for investment and, in some cases, may involve participation by the private sector in construction and financing of projects.
The reason the province hasn’t yet acted on Watertight is simply because the scale of need is so great it is taking time to figure out what to do, Caplan said.
“If there is one thing that Justice O’Connor was clear about when it came to ensuring that Ontarians have access to clean and safe drinking water it is that we need to completely review all of those aspects.
“The bottom line goal, what do we need to do to ensure safe clean water for the people of Ontario, that’s what this is all about,” Caplan said.