Comment
Rogue municipality
How shall our village grow? How shall it look 10 or 20 years from now? Will we recognize it? Forces are busy working to change our community. Decisions are being made on your behalf. By bureaucrats and administrators. By powerful developers. But not you.
It is mostly out of sight. You are not part of the discussion. None of the folks making these decisions has a direct stake in your community—how it evolves and changes. They are protecting careers and investments.
Wellington voices must rise up, for we are this community’s memory. We are its conscience. We must live with the consequences. Not bureaucrats. Not developers. It is us. And only us.
Item: Shire Hall has recently imposed an effective freeze on new home building in the village in recent weeks. Quietly, without consultation or notice, municipal folks decided that no more homes shall be built in Wellington. Planning for the large subdivisions sprawling north of the Millennium Trail across the top of the village may proceed apace, but the single home on the empty lot on your street is not permitted. It shall not be allowed.
A new water tower is rising out of the ground to serve the prospect of tracts of new homes spreading northward (promised for 12 years. But nothing yet.) Individual homes, however, that will offer shelter in a few months are not permitted.
Why? When was Shire Hall going to inform us?
Ostensibly, this decision was made to protect the operation of the village waterworks. Shire Hall has decreed that Wellington’s water and wastewater plants have reached capacity. As such, it will only permit an existing home to be replaced by a house of a similar scale. A new home is not permitted on an infill lot. Shire Hall’s worry is that additional residents will push the plant to the limit. Therefore, it has decided that any future infill building applications will be emblazoned with a ‘Hold’ symbol “pending adequate servicing being in place.”
It’s a big deal. Infill homebuilding makes the best use of the existing village infrastructure, including waterworks. It is more likely to fit the existing character and scale. Infill, by its nature, follows the pattern, design and nature of the village. Furthermore, it provides homes on a timeline that fits the village’s needs today.
Infill development was seen as critical by the framers of Wellington’s Secondary Plan. They understood development pressure was mounting beyond the Millennium Trail. It was palpable in those well-attended public consultation meetings in 2010 and 2011. This community had witnessed the development of Wellington on the Lake— both the good and the bad. Kaitlin had just secured an official plan amendment in a monthslong process and thus clearing the first hurdle for its development. Wellington residents came by the dozens and dozens to ensure that infill opportunities were expended before the village sprawled outward.
Indeed, the first paragraph of the Secondary Plan describing future residential growth states: “The policies of the Village Residential Area are intended to maintain and enhance the already established neighbourhoods of the community by encouraging compatible infill development and the extension of these neighbourhoods into surrounding undeveloped areas south of the Millennium Trail.”
First comes infill, then other lands below the Millennium Trail. Only then shall we encourage residential growth north of the trail. That is the prescribed order of growth spelled out in the Secondary Plan.
The decision to block infill turns the Wellington Secondary Plan on its head. In effect, it puts new subdivision development ahead of infill development— the antithesis of the ambitions stated by Wellington residents. It has substituted the will of the village for its own decision-making.
Waterworks’ decisions need to be better understood and discussed. According to the Wellington Master Service Plan prepared last summer by RVA, an engineering consultancy, the water plant has an operating capacity of 2,488 cubic metres per day (m3/day), which is the most it can produce. But demand ebbs and flows, so the plant operators have established a ‘reliable’ operating capacity of 1,255 m3/day—a sizable buffer.
Since 2011, the average daily demand has been about 540 m3/day (and trending downward)—about a fifth of the actual plant capacity. It should be noted, however, that some of this potential water supply has already been allocated to future development. Yet there remains considerable untapped capacity in the water plant.
The situation in wastewater is a bit tighter. The plant has a peak capacity of 4,550 m3/day. But we need a healthy buffer in a wastewater plant to prevent overrunning the plant on peak days and sending foul water into the lake. The “rated capacity” therefore is just 1,500 m3/day. Daily flow through the wastewater plant averages 540 to 980 m3 per day. The problem is that wastewater flows have exceeded the maximum ‘rated’ capacity during the last three years reported by the MSP.
That said, there are some peculiarities to Wellington’s wastewater system. Rain events tend to overwhelm the plant. A lot of basements are drained into the municipal sewers. While not a great situation, it is unclear that rainfall peaks should count against the capacity limits in the same way household sewage does—more a question than a comment.
But such is the problem. We have no forum to discuss these issues. To the extent our input is sought, it is managed to ensure the minimum effect on the operation of these plants. We are, instead, to rely on the governance of Council—most of whom have no stake in the County’s waterworks.
Developers have the ear of Shire Hall every day. They have invested a great deal of money into the expansion of Wellington’s waterworks. But we aren’t part of the conversation. Even when the Secondary Plan is explicit and prescriptive, Shire Hall decides otherwise.
It is ignoring the guardrails this community erected.
If the wastewater plant has a rated capacity and that is set to ensure no flow of untreated sewage into the lake, then it does not matter if flows exceeding capacity comes from sewage or rainwater. Capacity is still exceeded and the potential for “leakage” exists. It would seem that this is why the Welllngton ‘water plan’ includes upgrades to the intake and output sides of the water treatment system.
Likely it is the wastewater side that has led to the halt in infill building.
It is noted in this article that stormwater is making its way into the treatment system and that “A lot of basements are drained into the municipal sewers.” Water from sumps should not enter the sewage sewer system. If this water was not allowed into the system, it would seem that there would be capacity available in the sewage plant.