Reasonable

Congratulations Steve Ferguson. We’ve been waiting for you. There is much to do, so let’s get started.

Among your first calls, may we suggest you ring up Mitch Panciuk. Arrange for lunch. This week. Before Shire Hall staff jam up your schedule. Find the time to sit down over some pasta and salad, perhaps a bottle of Hillier cabernet franc or pinot grigio. Then fix the fetid and barnacled water agreement that has embarrassed both our communities since before amalgamation.

Mitch seems a reasonable person. Two reasonable people really should find a way to fix a totally unreasonable mess. We’re neighbours. We share a bridge—real and metaphorical. It is a positive and beneficial relationship. Deeply interdependent. It seems blindingly obvious to clear this up early—establish a basis of common decency and signal an understanding that together we are stronger. And to demonstrate that gouging your neighbour’s water users out of hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, runs counter to this shared interest.

You need not burrow into the origins of this humiliating deal. It is unnecessary to drag up the sordid history on this file or the lingering bad feelings it has caused. Rather, all that is needed, is simply to point out the current circumstance is intolerable and cannot continue.

That is, that a stranger pulling up a tanker truck alongside the Belleville water plant will pay $2.35 for a cubic metre of water today. Meanwhile Belleville is charging the County a whopping $4.08 for the same cubic metre of water we pull across the bridge. An indefensible bit of robbery for each and every drop of water we provide to the families in Rossmore and Fenwood Gardens.

No extra processing. No extra treatment. No delivery cost. The County pays to maintain the pipeline that carries Belleville water across the Norris Whitney bridge to these communities.

A 73 per cent premium? For what? Because we’re neighbours? This is how we treat each other?

Look Mitch straight in the eye and let him know it doesn’t have to be this way. This issue need not define the relationship between our communities. He should see this. And understand it intuitively.

If not, you know where you stand.

Soon enough, Belleville will need something. Support for some project. Backing for an ask to the province or federal government. They will need our help.

But before coming back to Picton, head on over to Todd Smith’s office. Make the case for intervention. Explain to him how the County already pays some of the highest water bills in the province because of inefficient and eyewateringly expensive water systems in Peats Point and Ameliasburgh, broken waterworks artifacts that were thrust upon the smattering of water users in this County—by way of direct pressure from the provincial government.

Todd is a reasonable guy. Let him know provincial bureaucrats can’t have it both ways—that they can’t impose horrendously expensive and ill-conceived water systems on a small group of consumers while simultaneously permitting a neighbouring jurisdiction to gouge County water users simply because they can. Something has to give. Todd will get this.

Then let’s get to work forming a waterworks commission— a permanent board of waterworks consumers, council representatives and County staff—to govern the system. Two ad hoc committees have taught us that our waterworks issues are too complex, too entrenched (pun intended) and defy easy answers to be left in council hands.

Six different water systems. One serves 19 homes, another nearly 5,000 homes. Two wastewater facilities. Nothing fits with the other.

Furthermore, it is a utility paid for entirely by the users of the system—all the operating costs, the repairs, maintenance, replacement costs and debt servicing, everything. It is long past the time that folks without any stake in the utility we’re the only ones making the decisions about capital expenditures, financing and growth.

Here is why it matters: In 2014, Shire Hall negotiated a new water supply agreement with Belleville to expand the amount of water to be taken for Rossmore and Fenwood Gardens. Anticipating new residential development. The issue of price for this water—a 73 per cent premium paid over other bulk water customers—never came up. It was never even part of the discussion.

Reasonable people can see there is a problem here. They can agree that it must be fixed. Let your term as mayor be the last to sweep our waterworks mess under the rug.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca