Area B director Rod Nichol has presented the regional district sewage commission with 700-plus names on a petition against the contentious No.2 pump station on Beech Street.
“There will be more to come,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting.
A second sewer pump station is required to remove or decommission an existing sewer forcemain from Willemar Bluff. The budget for the project is about $8.6 million.
Courtenay director Erik Eriksson suggests the petition addresses more than just the No.2 station but takes into account the foreshore and a “comprehensive, environmentally sensitive plan for the entire sewage system.”
He suggests developing an overall plan rather than just “pieces here and there.
“We have limited capacity in the current sewage treatment plant, we have opposition to the No.2 pump station, we have the issue of pipelines along the foreshore, we have the issue of Project Watershed wanting to restore the Field Sawmill site, and the issue of the No.1 pump station being there and it needing work,” Eriksson said.
“We have the issue of the failure of the south sewer referendum.”
He suggests a comprehensive plan could take east side sewage to the current treatment plant, and west side sewage to a new southerly plant that could include Cumberland.
“Since we’re going to be spending millions of dollars on patchwork, how can we go about planning for a comprehensive plan for the entire sewage network?” Eriksson said to a round of applause from the gallery.
A master sewer plan has identified a number of options that were narrowed to the Beech Street site.
“They did look at the distributed model with multiple facilities, and that planning exercise has concluded that the most cost-effective manner to continue to deliver sewage service for the core areas of the region was through a single facility,” said Kris La Rose, manager of liquid waste planning.
For more information, visit www.comoxvalleyrd.ca/comox2pumpstation