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OTTAWA — The city’s water and sewer rates may soar for the next decade, but at least users will be able to see the increases coming, says the chair of city council’s environment committee.
Besides backing a plan to hike water and sewer rates 73 per cent over 10 years, which the committee is to vote on Tuesday afternoon, Councillor Maria McRae wants a new rule to list the exact repair and expansion projects the city intends to carry out at least three years ahead of time, along with the impact they will have on rates. They’d have to be confirmed by votes on each year’s budget, but the idea is to make changes harder and the cost increases — along with the torn-up roads and other disruptions caused by major pipe projects — easier to budget for.
“It’s difficult for us as residents to not have predictability,” McRae said Monday. She’s given the plans her full-throated support, with backing from Mayor Jim Watson.
Specifically, her committee is to vote on the particular plan for 2012, which includes a six-per-cent hike to water and sewer rates to pay for a $286-million operating budget and a $390-million capital budget full of specific projects like new pumping stations and replacing the sewers under part of Sussex Drive. The increase is about $34 for an average household.
The committee is also to vote on a more general 10-year plan that anticipates $2.1 billion worth of work between now and the early 2020s. It anticipates price hikes of five, six and seven per cent a year — but isn’t remotely detailed about what’s to be done when. McRae’s proposal is to get a lot more specific, likely starting next year, about what the next few years will bring. “I’d like to see consistency in the planning and in the rates people can expect to pay,” she said.
This year’s capital plan for the water and sewer pipes is dramatically different from what was expected last year, for two big reasons.
The first is the city’s aggressive new plan for roadwork, so it’s done before light-rail construction starts digging up major downtown streets and disrupting traffic. McRae said the way needs to be as clear as possible for buses, drivers and cyclists trying to use alternative routes; the city has a general policy of trying to replace worn-out pipes at the same time as roads above them are rebuilt (as it has on Wellington, Preston and Bank streets recently), and so where road projects are being moved up, water and sewer projects have to be as well. Nearly $180 million of the $390-million capital plan is to pay for projects being rushed for the “Ottawa on the Move” transportation program.
“It’s cheaper to do it this way, all at once,” McRae said. “They always would have been on the books, but we’re going to get them done sooner.”
The second reason is that the city has decided that letting the clock run out on old pipes’ lifespans and hoping nothing goes wrong isn’t a good idea. McRae points to last winter’s blown-out water main under Woodroffe Avenue as an example of what can happen — months of traffic problems, restrictions on water use in Barrhaven and Riverside South, and an expensive emergency fix. That pipe died decades before its time, thanks to faulty materials, but McRae said there are plenty of other pipes the city knows need replacing and it just hasn’t spent the money.
“I look at the water main under Carling Avenue that’s being replaced because of the 417 widening. It’s a $43-million project and it’s going to take one more construction season to finish. It serves 400,000 people. I could not imagine having that done in pieces, in an emergency,” she said.
A smaller element in the construction plans is to reduce sewage overflows into the Ottawa River when old downtown sewers get overwhelmed. The project list includes $140 million for a “storage tunnel” downtown, essentially a great big pipe to hold excess rainwater or snowmelt until the sewage system can handle it.
The long-term plan relies on $1.7 billion in revenue from water users and $460 million in borrowing — loans the city is happy to take out because interest rates are at historic lows, around four per cent for long-term debentures, though it means the city expects to be paying $61 million a year in debt-servicing costs for the water system by 2021, up from $18 million a year now.
It still leaves $600 million worth of work on the to-do list, with no plan for funding it.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
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