BONNYVILLE – The MD of Bonnyville is putting together a comprehensive policy for when residents request waterline connections.
Council passed a motion during their May 19 committee meeting to deny all adjacent and non-adjacent municipal waterline requests until administration develops a comprehensive policy that will be presented at a later date.
The discussion originally came up during an April 28 council meeting when they received a request from a resident wanting to be connected to the waterline located between the City of Cold Lake and Fort Kent.
“Administration is saying we need to do some research,” noted Abid Malik, general manager of infrastructure services for the municipality. “We need to have a policy in place before we start allowing any connections.”
Reeve Greg Sawchuk said, “This is a moratorium until we have all of the information because there’s a lot of serious questions regarding that policy in regards to water.”
While infrastructure services conduct the research, which will include determining the appropriate engineering standards, no further MD waterline connection applications will be permitted.
Flat out denying those who are adjacent to the waterline was something Coun. Dana Swigart was reluctant to do.
“I know somebody right now that applied about two years ago, they’re adjacent, so they could be hooked in. If we deny it now, I think we have to consider that there might be people that have applied and we’re going to deny them.”
CAO Al Hoggan stressed “the fair thing for everybody is to stop, take a look at everything, create solid policies and infrastructure on the policy end of things to ensure that when people hook up, it’s not going to be first-come, first-serve.”
“Once we open the flood gates, everybody will want to be hooked up to the waterline,” Hoggan continued. “I think we need to have that infrastructure in place internally, both in the ground and above the ground, as to how we’re going to handle the influx.”
Swigart requested there be a deadline given to administration to come back with the information due to how long some landowners have been waiting.
“I’ve had residents... that asked for the same thing, access to the waterline and we were never able to respond to them because we couldn’t come to grips with how we were going to handle this,” he stated.
Hoggan responded by saying he was in favour of giving administration a date to aim for but the onus of the situation was with council.
“Goal three of the strategic plan, that objective is ‘development of a long-term plan to offer water to all properties.’ That’s a pretty big objective. I guess to get started on the policy, what we’re going to be asking council for is to give us some direction as to how to define all properties,” Hoggan detailed. “Does that mean we’re going to put a plan together to offer water out to the very west side, very east side, and the very north side? In terms of the timing of when this policy will come back, it would really be dependent on council sitting down together in either a workshop or in some kind of a working group and giving us clear direction as to what you want that water policy to look like.”
Council will meet toward the end of June or early July to review the information administration has gathered.
Robynne Henry, Bonnyville Nouvelle
