Big water

Plans revealed for Wellington water and wastewater plants—with a twist

Shire Hall unveiled its plans for new water and wastewater plants in Wellington last week. Each is a significant undertaking on its own—but an option to bring water from Wellington to Picton, Carrying Place, Rossmore and points in between may make it a truly massive infrastructure project. The implications in terms of funding, execution risk and the loss of waterfront greenspace are greater than anything Shire Hall has ever taken on.

Despite the enormity of the potential impact on residents across the County, fewer than 50 residents turned out for the information session. Many in attendance worry that the proposed water processing and wastewater treatment plants will consume rare waterfront parkland upon which the current plants reside. Others fear that Shire Hall is running ahead too quickly—that the County may be investing tens of millions of dollars to serve development that may be decades away.

In 2021 Shire Hall produced the Wellington Master Servicing Plan (MSP). New homebuilding was on the horizon. After 15 years of false starts, developers seemed to be serious about expanding Wellington north of the Millennium Trail. Municipal waterworks folks worried that if all the development proposed was suddenly unleashed, the current system would soon run out of capacity to serve them. The water tower was too small, and the pipes were fragile and in the wrong place (a water line loop is preferred to the linear pipe that stretches from one end of the village to the other). The plants still had room—save for rare heavy rain events—but the new MSP projected a quadrupling of the village’s population. In a decade and a bit, it was predicted, the village would explode from 2,000 souls to 8,600 (that estimate has now been revised upward as higher density—multi-residential, townhomes and such—have been added to the plans).

Faced with the potential gap in capacity, County waterworks folks fell into the condition many home renovators encounter—while-weare- at-it disease. If the village was truly growing that quickly, maybe it should build big, shiny new plants now rather than wait until the plants were overwhelmed. That led to a much bigger whilewe- are-at-it discussion.

The County has tenuous and expensive deals with Belleville and Quinte West to supply water to Carrying Place, Consecon, Rossmore and Fenwood Gardens. Nineteen homes are served from an eyewateringly expensive municipal well at Peat’s Point. And Picton has a precarious water intake pipe lying on muck just a few metres below a variety of marine traffic in the bay. Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could replace all these various sources—and Roblin Lake, too— with a single water source from Wellington?

And to be fair, it is a perfectly reasonable and logical question. But the sheer scale of the project is far beyond anything ever undertaken in this community. And critically, the 4,700 customers of the County’s waterworks utility have no reasonable prospect of funding it.

Nevertheless, Shire Hall is intent on finding out. Part of the presentation last week in Wellington was the big outline of what such a grand waterworks plant would look like in Wellington.

It would be big. Really big. The plans depicted last week on a series of panels arrayed at the community centre showed most of the green space surrounding the current water plant consumed by vast new plants that stretched up to Main Street. Neighbours on Carla Court expressed their dismay at the prospect of industrial works looming over their backyards. They noted that the existing waterworks lands serve as parkland for many folks—and that it would be lost forever.

Others worried about who will pay for such ambitious plans. The County has a deal to extract development charges in advance from the developer. Further, it has a $4 million deposit in hand. But the County has spent $18 million already, and the projected cost of the entire project—before the regional water supply plan—is likely more than $100 million.

Much is riding on the developer building thousands of new homes—or at least paying the development charges for this many new homes. Should the developer decide to slow-walk or put off its plans for a couple of years—or ten—the cost of carrying this debt will flow back to existing waterworks customers in Wellington, Consecon, and Picton. Water rates are already among the highest in the province—such an event would make it much worse.

The County will return in the fall to present its preferred solutions.

Residents wishing to comment on plans have 30 days to do so. They may contact the Shire Hall staff lead, Garrett Osborne at gosborne@pecounty.on.ca