Ever since Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development announced back in February that Cold Lake would serve as an acceptable water source for providing the Town of Bonnyville and surrounding communities with clean, stable drinking water, local leaders have been pushing for the province to make funds available to move forward with the project “sooner rather than later.”
Amongst those behind the push is Mayor of Bonnyville Gene Sobolewski, who, with the help of local MLA for Bonnyville – Cold Lake Genia Leskiw, says he hopes to speak to provincial ministers Diana McQueen, Wayne Drysdale and Ken Hughes in the coming weeks to try and press home the point that this project is a “huge priority” for municipalities in northeastern Alberta.
“This project is a very high priority for the Town of Bonnyville, and I'm sure (for our neighbouring municipalities) also,” Sobolewski said. “We want to move forward with plans to bring water to Bonnyville sooner rather than later.”
Right now, Sobolewski said the project was being left in limbo after the revelation from Drysdale in caucus last month that there was no money for the pipeline in the provincial budget for the next three years. The $66 million project will be funded through the province's Water for Life program, with the provincial government picking up 90 per cent of the cost, with the remaining 10 per cent paid for by municipalities partnering up on the project.
Sobolewski said it was important that both the Town of Bonnyville and City of Cold Lake continue to press forward to try and set up meetings with the province to “get the ball rolling” for preliminary engineering and pre-design for the project.
“The reality with this project is that we're at the exact same stage we were at a couple of years ago,” Sobolewski said. “We need to get our funding approved and start going into engineering and pre-design and just starting to rationalize what it is that's actually going to be occurring and just going into things with greater detail.”
As it stands, water from Cold Lake is piped through the city out to 4 Wing Cold Lake, through Ardmore before concluding in Fort Kent. The proposed regional waterline would see the pipeline extended to include Bonnyville, LaCorey, Kehewin Cree Nation, Glendon, Therien and Cold Lake First Nations. Cherry Grove and Elizabeth Metis Settlement would also be connected to the water source.
Along with finding the funds to move forward with the project, another sticking point is determining how the pipeline will be ran upon completion, with the partnering municipalities unsure of which route it will be taking regarding the operational side of things.
“What we're thinking right now is that there may be a different commission set up that might own the waterline and operate it (like a business),” Sobolewski said. “So what we need to is to reconcile who are going to be commission members, what the commission is going to look like and how it will be governed, amongst other things. There's a business plan and model that will need to be drawn up, so it's going to take a lot of work.”
Stopping short of putting a definitive time frame on when he expects initial work to begin on the pipeline, Sobolewski said there was lots of paperwork and discussions to be had yet, but that in a “strictly ideal world” he'd like to see all the engineering complete by next spring so that construction could begin in May 2015. He did indicate however that that scenario was “unlikely” to happen.
With the province seemingly dragging its feet when it comes to committing to the project, Sobolewski said he wanted to promote thinking “outside the box” when it came to moving ahead with the pipeline.
“The biggest part of the puzzle will be finding out how this will be funded, and one of the things we're trying to encourage the province on right now is that for certain aspects, especially capital projects, debt is not a bad word,” Sobolewski said. “You have an asset that you're going to be building that will be lasting for approximately 75 years, something like that shouldn't (be considered debt). They don't need to put 100 per cent of the funds forward in the first year, they can amortize it over say 10 or 15 years so that it's palatable and achievable to construct.”
He added, “We want to be able to say this is an incredibly important project in the northeast that the province really needs to focus on, so we need to start thinking about doing things a little bit differently, and that's an approach we're certainly taking.”
