Experts

Same question, different answers

The 2014 Report can be found here.

Picton should get its drinking water from Picton. Not from Wellington. This was the finding of a comprehensive study commissioned by Shire Hall just over ten years ago. Mayor Ferguson says critics of plans to run water from Wellington through Bloomfield, past Base31 to Picton, should listen to the experts. The experts, however, drew a different conclusion in 2014.

That year, R.V. Anderson, an engineering consulting firm, took a deep dive that examined an array of sources for Picton’s water. The 65-page report—packed with maps, charts and rigorous accounts of flora and fauna—zeroed in on four alternatives: a new intake and plant in Picton and three scenarios that looked at bringing water from Wellington.

The professional engineering firm conducted a thorough analysis and concluded that building a new water treatment plant and a new water intake into Picton Bay “ranked as first and the most preferred alternative.”

R.V. Anderson reported that this alternative “reduced vulnerability to contaminants, posed minor environmental impacts during construction, and could be accomplished with lower construction and operating costs”.

This past January, however, another engineering firm concluded something entirely different. CIMA, an engineering consultancy, conducted a broad study of all six water systems in Prince Edward County. In Picton, the consultant found that the “preferred” strategy was to build a new regional water treatment plant (WTP) in Wellington, build a pipeline to Picton and decommission the existing plant.

What changed? How did two reputable engineering firms study the same question and produce radically different results? A couple of things changed: growth expectations skyrocketed, and a barge sank at Picton Terminals.

BIG GROWTH IDEAS
Somewhere in the intervening years, Shire Hall began predicting a massive wave of new homebuilding in Picton and Wellington. Developers made plans, and those plans added up to a lot of new homes. Potentially.

It turns out that CIMA relied upon a 2022 development plan provided by Shire Hall that indicated a five-fold increase in population in Picton and Bloomfield—requiring a comparable increase in water capacity from 6,853 m3 per day to 32,900 m3 per day. The existing plant, while operating at about 61 per cent of its capacity currently, would not keep up with that pace of expected growth.

The outlook, however, has surely changed again. The prospect of many hundreds of new homes being built every year in Picton and Wellington seems faint and fading. Indeed, the County’s demographic and economic consultants, Watson and Associates, project population growth to cap out at just over one per cent per year for the next two decades.

At that rate, nearly 160 years will pass before Picton and Bloomfield’s population needs the water capacity proposed in Shire Hall’s 2022 plan. (It’s not the first time Shire Hall massively overshot population forecasts. A study conducted in 2003 imagined a County population of more than 32,000 within a decade, but 13 years after this prediction, the population of Prince Edward County had actually decreased.)

As with all things entangled in the County’s waterworks plans, the 2022 plan depends entirely on developers’ estimates rather than expert analysis.

BARGE INCIDENT
But something else has changed since 2014. Residents’ faith in the water from Picton Bay was shaken in March 2017, when a barge ferrying gravel to Amherst Island sank at Picton Terminals.

Some of the fuel carried on board leaked into the water, prompting the municipality to shut down the Picton water intake for a week. Water was trucked in from neighbouring municipalities for the duration.

In the aftermath, the municipality installed a hydrocarbon (petroleum) filtration system into the Picton plant. The then-head of the municipality’s works department, Robert Macauley, said residents could take comfort in the fact that its operational safeguards worked to protect the safety of their water supply. But he added that it would be better for Picton’s water to come from Wellington—and that the province should pay for it.

“The problem and solution are beyond the municipality itself,” noted Macauley in 2017.

Indeed, R.V. Anderson came to the same conclusion three years earlier. While the idea of taking water from Lake Ontario and pumping it to Picton has long been attractive, Council ruled it out repeatedly. The financing commitment, debt load and risk profile were determined to be far beyond the capacity of a 6,000-customer utility.

The killer has always been the cost. Without the province—or another entity— stepping up to pay for a regional water plant and a 21-kilometre twinned water transmission system, the notion is not feasible. Nor does it make sense to underwrite the cost on the backs of water rate payers and waiting decades to collect development charges. Council came to this conclusion at least twice over the past decade.

Meanwhile, the Picton plant has been delivering safe, clear drinking water for 97 years. Both CIMA and R.V. Anderson agree that the plant will reach the end of its useful life by 2042—17 years hence. There is no need to rush into an expensive and risk-laden decision.

Given more sober and expert-supported expectations of growth, it seems prudent to revisit R.V. Anderson’s 2014 conclusion. That is “the comparison of alternatives for water supply, determined that the preferred alternative was for the construction of a new, longer and deeper intake pipe for Picton WTP. This alternative would provide improved raw water quality, allow for intake renewal and future growth and improve operation and maintenance. The environmental and socio-economic impacts were short-term and could be mitigated. This option was also economically advantageous and technically feasible.”

The R.V. Anderson report landed on Council’s desk in September 2014. It appears to have left no mark. No debate. It was an election year. By the new year, the report was forgotten, relegated to a dusty shelf. There were other priorities.