More households could draw from Lantzville’s water system if the district lowers connection standards, but council isn’t prepared to make the adjustment just yet.
Lantzville council agreed not to change its water connection standards until there’s improvements to the wellfield, more storage and a back up water supply – all recommendation from a Koers and Associates Engineering review this year.
Council asked for rationale, options and a recommended per connection water volume requirement, in January, along with a more comprehensive review, after district consultants and employees advised that the current requirement is outdated and exceptionally high, a staff report shows. The district hired Koers to do a water demand design standard review.
While the current standard is 3,400 litres per day for residential connections, a 2015 report by the same consultants showed over the past several years the maximum daily demand is less than half that number. Koers recommended the district could go down to 2,900 litres per day, per connection, but that the municipality first increase its reservoir storage, secures and integrates additional water supply, and implement improvements to the wellfield.
District CAO Brad McRae said you have to look at water and sewer like a living organism – it’s not something that operates in a vacuum and you don’t necessarily know what will happen if you put more strain on an aquifer.
“It’s nature and nature does its thing,” he said.“You are going to put a new level of strain potentially on the aquifer you’ve never put before and we don’t fully know the ramifications or repercussions that will cause.”
Coun. Bob Colclough considers the connection standard artificially high and wanted to see it corrected now, pointing out there’s still certain requirements people have to meet to connect to water.
“Maybe the idea is to wait and try to deal with everything at once. My way of thinking is, well we’ve identified this as being artificially high, let’s fix that, then let’s deal with our reservoir situation, let’s deal with pipe sizing and just systematically work through until everything is done so that people can connect up,” he said.
Coun. John Coulson, who supported the staff recommendation, said he’s in favor of looking at reducing standards down the road, but not at this time. The Koers report captured a lot of things that have to be in place before the standards are considered, and also suggests the standard the district is looking at is more consistent with a larger municipality, according to Coulson, who believes the next step is to look at what the aquifer is capable of providing and what the district and council wants to do with the “extra water” they have.
“To lower the standard right now, I have to really question who is that really going to benefit?” he said.