That certainly seems like the direction that Council is going after last night’s City Council meeting.
Council endorsed spending 298 thousand dollars to pay for the design of a Water Treatment System to be ready for the next round of potential funding opportunities for the senior governments.
And while Health Canada’s new guidelines for manganese triggered the decision, there is also talk about chlorination…
City Manager Byron Johnson…
“In addition to the Manganese, we do not treat our water for microbiological contamination, and this has been a long going issue where the city has not needed to treat the water, we test very aggressively on an accelerated schedule to ensure our water complies but we do not have a chlorination system. The trend for health authorities has been towards requiring treatment for chlorination, requiring treatment, and in particular chlorination, to provide a higher level of assurance of non contamination. So while we’re doing this project and the key driver is manganese, at the same time it makes sense to be treating for microbiological contamination considering chlorination, and in fact the engineers tell us you almost can’t separate them, that to do manganese treatment effectively you need to chlorinate because it causes the manganese to precipitate and then it can be filtered out.”
Johnson was asked by Councillor Ron Paull if chlorination was the only option…
“No. There are other options and in fact we would have Urban Systems look at what those other options are without doing detailed work. Some of them have very significant drawbacks, like some of them are very inefficient processes. For a water system our size typically this is the answer but it’s certainly not the only one out there, there are other potential solutions that can solve some of the problems, perhaps Manganese, perhaps some of the microbiologics. We will have a bit of that summary work done so that you as Council will come to the conclusion of this is the right step because it’s the logical and the most efficient way of doing it, it’s not just to ram one idea down your throat, where there are options it will be delivered to you.”
Johnson did say that there will be some public engagement, but it doesn’t sound like public input is going to be invited…
“Part of the project for the engagement will be to host open houses to the community to learn more about water treatment options. Due to the technical nature and probably limited solutions available it’s more about disseminating information to the public as opposed to asking their input. Most people we hear from love our water, they would like it to remain as it sits right now, so I am afraid that most community input would be don’t change a thing, just somehow get back into compliance. That I don’t think is a valid position anymore.”
The 298 thousand dollars will come out of the City’s water capital reserve.
The work is expected to start this year and continue into 2020.