Work will begin right away on a small part of the city's growing sewer problem, if Charlottetown city council agrees next Monday.
Coun. Edward Rice, chair of the water and sewer committee will introduce a motion to un-hook the University of Prince Edward Island from the offending Spring Park combined line.
The Spring Park system joins street waste water with municipal sewer into one pipe. In heavy rains, the system is overwhelmed and sends raw sewage into the Charlottetown Harbour.
"It's not anything great," said Rice. "People needn't think it's an answer but this is the level that we have been allowed to work at."
On November 1 the city was ordered by Environment Canada to fix the sewer overflow problem. The city wants to separate the Spring Park line into two separate pipes, as it did years ago with the Brighton line. That will cost $18 million, said Rice. The province and the city both have pledged one third of that cost.
The federal government has not, said Rice. In fact the office of Gail Shea , federal minister responsible for P.E.I., told the Guardian that no more money will be forthcoming, and sewer problems have never be cited in priority lists from Charlottetown or P.E.I.
That is true, says a very frustrated Rice.
He tried to make the sewer problem a top priority of the city this September, but support for his motion from seconder Coun. Cecil Villard vanished just hours before the meeting.
In fact city government could not care less about sewer and water issue because there is no votes in those issues, said Rice.
He said, for example, that the rates collected by the committee for sewer and water are subject to a secret tax grab. The water and sewer budget has to pay for part of the cost of municipal elections, an antiquated vestige of the former water utility days, said Rice.
The committee has to pay $200,000 yearly rent for its offices, unlike other departments, and it even pays some sort of residual monthly fee for a building it sold to the police department years ago.
"Who is doing the books? Houdini?" said Rice. "We operate on a shoestring. Our assistant engineer who has been gone since 2003 has never been replaced."
A city needs to support its key "pillars" of responsibility first, said Rice. They are fire, police, public works and sewer and water.
"If they are not functioning, the rest doesn't matter," said Rice. "Everyone is worthy of getting ditches filled in, but not at the expense of the four pillars of our community.
"It's ironic that we just won an international award for five elements - heritage, cleanliness, environment, sustainability and water conservation.
"It's obvious the judges didn't go down to the Charlottetown harbour at low tide," said Rice.
He hears that a lawsuit is in the works to sue the city for its sewer overflows that are ruining the shellfish industry. He only hopes the issue does not get taken out of context to make a trade war for Canadian shellfish heading to the United States.
The only solution is to now go to the federal government "with cap in hand," said Rice.
