ASK Salt Spring: Answered - Ep 29 Brian Pyper

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Ask Salt Spring Answered talks to Brian Pyper, chair of the North Salt Spring Water District about the moratorium on new water hookups, the future of Channel Ridge and other topics related to water.

you're listening to episode 29 of ask salt spring answered in which we speak with brian piper the chair of the north salt spring water district about the moratorium on new water and also about the future of Channel Ridge and other topics. Okay, we're here with Brian Piper, who is the board chair of the North Salt Spring Water District. And we've just been with Ask Salt Spring talking about a couple of things coming up on their agenda, one of which was the moratorium review, which, as we all know, has been in place now for nine years, and the Water District is going to be reviewing that. Tell us a bit more about that, Brian.

All right, thank you. At the last AGM in May, we rolled out what we hoped was going to be our map to the moratorium review process, and we're a little delayed but encouraged by the steps that will happen shortly. And that's twofold. We have a master plan being developed, which is kind of from an operational perspective of what we would do with water in the future, accounting for zoning issues, et cetera, and a hydrology review, which is almost complete as well,

and that looks at how much excess capacity we might have within either the Maxwell or St. Mary systems to support additional connections. That process and review by the board, we hope to have finished in the early spring so that in late spring, we can open that process up to public engagement, working with other agencies, as well as informing rate payers of the next steps that we see in essentially transferring this moratorium policy into a future connection policy. And it's quite a complicated process, as I understand it. Listening today, you have to look at all kinds of other factors to see whether you're going to be able to increase the supply or have enough supply to open up more connections, right? Yes, and it's been a series of hydrology reports, and each one seems to have identified more uncertainties that need either additional data collection or additional thought placed into it.

But I think we're at the final stages of being able to call this best available science and do a good job of incorporating future climate change scenarios that we really need to account for moving forward. And of course, the other thing is, I think we talked about leaks. You're identifying where we're losing water through the system. Yes. And plugging those, that would provide with some extra capacity, presumably. Yeah, that's been on the board's radar, but we haven't been able to do it, I think, from an operational perspective. But we're fully staffed up now. And what we do know is that the Maxwell system, it's about a 7% loss or potential leakage.

And that's with respect to what is withdrawn at the lake versus what is metered at the properties that it's servicing. And 7% is excellent. On the St. Mary's side, it's been around 19%, and that's where we've, in the last year, put extra efforts into leak detection, including hiring consultants to check out different sections of pipe. And leaks have been identified and fixes have been made. And hopefully within the next water audit, which will take some time, we'll be able to see the benefits of those efforts.

So when you talk about 19%, that's obviously quite a big slice. Is there any kind of estimate as to how much actual water that is on an annual basis? Yes, I wouldn't. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but it's, you know. It's thousands and thousands of gallons. Yes, yes. And there's a variety of factors that can lead to that particular estimate. It could be meter problems, as an example. But the due diligence that's being done right now is to go out and check out sections of old pipe, monitoring with kind of an acoustic sounding systems or some other technology that allows for leaks to get identified and then fixed.

And do you have any feeling as yet as to whether, in fact, you will find extra capacity? Do you think that's going to happen in terms of possibly having some new connections? That, I'm hopeful, but we can't say it until we get those final numbers in and assess it. Because the way that these hydrology reports work is first to figure out, you know, what the expected water in versus water out is. But it also utilizes almost 100 years of climate data to run the different scenarios. So there's going to be lots of years where we would have additional capacity. But then there's those years where we don't get the rain to recharge a lake, or we have long drought summers like we do this year. And then that pushes the system to what we've called zero storage, which we simply do not want to cross.

And so by using 100 years or so of data, we can get a pretty good assessment of what kind of risk we would have for a given demand of how many years within that 100, we might reach something like zero capacity, and that's an amount we want to avoid. So if there is no additional capacity and our usage right now is moving forward the most that we want to use, then that's the answer that will come out. And if there's additional capacity, then we would kind of go to the next question of if there's additional capacity, how can we best use that in particular with the current housing crisis that we have here on the island? And how does climate change affect that?

Obviously, I mean, climatologists don't really know exactly what's going to happen in the future. So how are you taking that into account? So the current methodology that's used by our contractor, KWL, and I've got a lot of experience with climate modeling myself, is to use the best, most recent forecasts from a variety of climate models to project what would happen in, say, 2050, I think is the range that we have. And those climate models will give kind of an average assessment for precipitation and temperature. And what we would expect is that we're going to, in the future, have warmer and wetter winters, but warmer and drier summers. And in particular, that combination of a warm, dry summer leading to a lot of evaporation with not a lot of precipitation

to input to the lake is going to be kind of the rate-limiting factor on future demand-supply scenarios. Now, one thing that came up as sort of a sidebar to this whole story was a question about Channel Ridge. And I know that you're restricted in some ways by ongoing court hearings, but can you tell me what the situation is there in general terms? As I understand it, Oni Corporation, who bought the land up there, already has permission to put in a certain number of connections, which they haven't done,

because they want more. As a result of your survey and your supply estimates, will there then be a chance to go back to that project and see whether it's going to be going ahead or not? So currently, Aani has paid for roughly 120 or 125 connections, and that's a mix of single and multifamily dwelling usage. So those could be developed at any time, and the parcel taxes get paid for them every year. What's in question is an additional 200 or so connections that they want to see occur, and that's what the litigation surrounds. And this is water that would come from St. Mary Lake. So it's that particular system.

And I want to emphasize that currently we have two independent systems, the St. Mary Lake system with a water treatment plant and the Maxwell system for which a treatment plant will be built within the next few years. So the Aani litigation refers to the St. Mary side. So the assessment of that water would inform us as to whether or not we have additional capacity. And it's been the St. Mary system that has really driven our water restrictions over

the years and the concerns for our water supply. Not to say that there isn't concerns at Maxwell, but we do know that the St. Mary's system has been tight. So we just have to wait and see what the results are. Without answering it specifically. Yeah, that's it. Right, okay. And we did talk about the Maxwell Lake water treatment plant. And what is the status of that right now?

It is in the kind of final design stages. There's been a few things that have come up that have delayed the final design. But what we need for is the final design, then it goes out to tender so that we can get a sense for how much the build will cost. And at the same time, we need to go to the repairs through a referendum with respect to borrowing the money to build that treatment plant, which is non-negotiable in terms of the treatment plant. We've been mandated by the Ministry of Health to build it, and so we will. Right. It's just a question of how long it takes to get all that together, I guess.

That's right. Yeah. And I think there was some discussion at the meeting also about funding, and I was surprised to learn, I think, from you that there are only two kinds of improvement districts that are eligible for certain kinds of funding, and that was fire and street lighting, but not water improvement districts. Is that correct for this kind of capital funding? Yes, it's odd. And so the current BC policy with respect to improvement districts is apply for federal or provincial infrastructure grants, which has been a major problem for us in which we've been lobbying the province as well as the CRD in various ways to try to get that particular policy changed or to do something about it. But within the Improvement District Act,

those improvement districts that provide fire protection or street lighting through the BC assessment of taxes that they are subject to means that they can have access to preferential lending rates. And this becomes important because with the Maxwell treatment plant for us to have access to provincial lending rates instead of having to go to private banks could mean up to a four million dollar savings to our ratepayers moving forward to finance that treatment plant so right now we are we're engaged in approaching the province and

hopefully working with our MLA to see if we can't get our improvement district or water districts in general into that same category of improvement district that has access to preferential lending rates. What is the total budget for that treatment plant? We're guessing it's going to be around ten million dollars. Okay so four million is a huge saving then. Four million well that's ten million dollar cost of to build the plant with the interest paid over 20 or 30 year time horizon and that's where the four million savings comes from. Okay now just going from there we talked about a couple of

surveys that you have or that are going on right now. One was a customer satisfaction survey I believe. Yes. Service service satisfaction survey and the results of that are going to be coming out in January as I gather. Yes. A service satisfaction survey, and the results of that are going to be coming out in January, as I gather. Yes. You said, I think, that it was mostly positive. Well, in the past it has been. We did it two years ago and two years before that. And, yes, it has been very positive, I think,

with respect to the water service delivery and quality provided by our district. Usually what comes out of those surveys that's most interesting are the kind of handwritten comments or the additional comments that people have that give us insight into maybe their particular service issues and other things. So we like to be able to do this every two years and see what kind of continuity or changing things are happening. And we have made changes in our rates, for example, with a sharp increase in our summertime rates. We don't know what the feedback will be on that kind of particular issue. Yeah, and on that question, I think we talked about that you have a tiered system in the summer where people who are overusing their water get penalized financially in a tiered system,

right? Yes, well, I mean, overusing or just when it's high usage. With each kind of block of, say, 4,000 gallons of extra usage, the rates increase significantly. And the goal there is to hopefully through education and through pricing lead to reduced water consumption during those summer months when we're most at risk of low lake levels. Right. Now the second survey is being done, I think, by another body, but

it looks into whether people are in favor of the water district becoming a CRD entity. Right. So one of the issues that we faced is the possibility of converting to a CRD service. And without going into the background of that in detail, this board has had a lot of concern with the loss of autonomy that will be associated with that conversion process and with the other examples of improvement districts on the island that have gone through that process. And so what we've done is commissioned a survey independently done of past and present CRD commissioners on those advisory boards for other CRD services that used to be improvement districts like ours. So Fulford or Cedar Lane or these particular districts that converted. And asking those commissioners about their experience through the conversion process to the CRD. And this survey is meant to help inform board members, future board members, and hopefully ratepayers as well, as to the potential benefits or risks or drawbacks and advantages, et cetera, of the conversion process.

Right. And I did love one phrase you used at one point was that you had to be sure that the data you were collecting held water. That was a good expression. And this data will be coming back to you in January. And I think at some point it was said that decisions would be made on the moratorium, hopefully, by the AGM for the water district, which is in May, early May? The decisions? No. At that point, what we hope to have is a fulsome understanding of potential additional capacity within the two lake systems. Okay. So that at that point, we would be saying, okay, either we have no additional capacity, in particular when we factor in climate change, and so therefore the moratorium policy becomes our current connection policy, which is that we're not going to be entertaining new connections in the future, or hopefully we do identify additional capacity in one or both of the systems.

And so then we can talk about and engage with the public and other agencies as to how we would move forward with a new connection policy. And those will be very challenging conversations, I think, because right now with the housing crisis that we're facing on the island, there's a lot of different ways that that water could be potentially allocated to additional connections or additional new legal suites, as an example to hopefully find a balance between addressing our housing shortage, as well as what's a fair way to allow for additional connections in our system. Okay. So then as a result of that finding, I guess, what sort of timeline could we look forward to then for something actually to happen? That's a great question.

So, A, if there's no additional capacity, then there won't be that next stage. then it's how quickly we can kind of be able to sit down on the legal side of things and with other agencies on the island and with ratepayers themselves to see what is the best path forward with that water. And I don't know, but that's a period of months for sure. Okay. Okay, thanks, Brian, for coming in and talking to us. This is Ask Salt Spring Answered. You're listening to Cheer.fm, the voice of the Gulf Islands.

Thank you very much. Thanks a lot.