The newest sewage treatment tactic divides the region into east and west.
Capital Regional District directors approved a new framework to gauge the value of subset wastewater treatment options at a meeting last week.
This new framework gives Core Area Liquid Waste Management Plan participants the opportunity to have subcommittees, or work individually with the support of CRD staff, to develop and evaluate treatment options for their communities.
Colwood, Esquimalt, Langford, View Royal, and the Songhees Nation make up a west side subcommittee to work with CRD staff and a technical working group to develop a sub-regional wastewater treatment plan.
“That subcommittee will begin to review options that they might consider for those four municipalities in terms of a subregional wastewater treatment plan,” said Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen after the meeting. “That opens the way for us to do the same on the east side: Oak Bay, Victoria and Saanich. We’ve already started down that path so yesterday was just the formalization of the west side. We have a working group of chief administrative officers who have had a number of meetings and have begun looking at the issue of what would an east side plan look like.”
In August, council asked staff to begin discussions with the municipality of Saanich and City of Victoria to collectively come up with a “Plan B.” Subcommittees will report to the Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee and CRD board and will be supported by CRD staff.
“This will be a very long process. We’re only in the infancy of what we might study,” Jensen said. “When you look at what happened last time … from 2006 to when a contract was tendered was eight years. So a process that complicated in nature is very significant time wise.”
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