Oak Bay Mayor Nils Jensen plans to officially make his bid to re-look at McLoughlin Point for wastewater treatment.
“When it was revealed to the Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee that the new plans would be anywhere from twice as much to three times as much, I came to the conclusion that we should reconsider McLoughlin for a number of reasons,” he said. “One, we knew the costs. Two, we owned that particular property and three, it was zoned for sewage treatment.”
Esquimalt rejected the site for sewage treatment in spring 2014. At the time Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins said Capital Regional District officials failed to deliver requested information including details on First Nations consultation, meeting minutes and an independent tsunami report for McLoughlin Point. The decision followed days of public hearings and received a standing ovation.
Jensen voiced his concerns over cost after a meeting in December. He’ll make it official with a notice of motion for the Jan. 27 CRD meeting of the Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee.
“The motion is to ask our Technical Oversight Panel to look at the feasibility, to examine in all the circumstances whether or not that is a suitable site,” Jensen said.
“One of the reasons TOP was created was to give the public confidence that all the options were being looked at.”
During that December meeting, the panel was also tasked with investigating another option that would see a Colwood, Langford, Esquimalt First Nation option. It’s now a subset of option 5.
McLoughlin isn’t the only site he feels shows potential. The CRD also has zoned land at Macaulay Point.
“It’s not big enough by itself, but it’s immediately adjacent to DND property which hasn’t and will never be used for defence purposes,” Jensen said. “This new federal government may be more open to that as a possibility.”
The CRD needs to have a site chosen and zoned to meet the March 31 deadline for one of the three federal funders.