Iqaluit water licence lumbers its way through Nunavut regulatory system

Iqaluit’s notorious West 40 dump, as it looked in 2010. The City of Iqaluit’s water licence application contains a decommissioning and reclamation plan for the site. (FILE PHOTO)

Two days after industrial firefighters snuffed out dumpcano’s last smoking embers, the Nunavut Impact Review Board agreed to screen Iqaluit’s “new” water licence application.

The application, first submitted Nov. 5, 2012, contains a closure plan for the city’s West 40 dump, site of the notorious 122-day dumpcano garbage fire that ended Sept. 16.

The cost of decommissioning the old dump is estimated, in 2011 dollars, at around $894,000, with annual monitoring costs of about $65,000 a year during a 25-year post-closure plan.

Under that plan, the city could cover the dump site with soil and gravel and attempt to revegetate the site with native tundra plant species.

The city’s application also includes its new waste management plan, which provides for a new $14 million landfill site about 7.5 kilometres northwest of the city.

The final version of that waste management plan wasn’t delivered until earlier this year, after it was approved by city council this past Jan. 28.

Earlier that month, enforcement agents from Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development had dropped by to warn Iqaluit officials — in a behind closed doors in-camera meeting — that they had failed to deal with repeated warning letters that federal officials had sent over the previous two years.

At the time, these warning letters were unknown to the public because the enforcement agents had been dealing with them in private.

But the news entered the public domain this past May, when some city councilors complained the city’s administration had not told them about AAND’s warning letters over the previous two years.

The city finally submitted all the information required for its water licence application this past July 15, the NIRB said Sept. 18, in a letter to the city.

The City of Iqaluit’s last valid water licence expired almost three years ago.

In addition to seeking approval for its new waste management plan, in its new licence application the city seeks approvals related to the West 40 sewage treatment plant and backup sewage lagoon, the extraction of about 1.1 million cubic meters of water annually from Lake Geraldine, operation of the water treatment plant, and numerous other issues.

Now that the three-year-old application is finally ready for the NIRB screening process, the review board now seeks comments from various federal and territorial government agencies and other entities, including the Nunavut Water Board and the Qikiqtani Inuit Association.

By Oct. 9, the NIRB invites various parties to tell them:

• whether the proposal is likely to arouse significant public concern, and if so, why;

• whether the proposal is likely to create significant adverse environmental or socio-economic effects;

• whether any adverse affects can be mitigated with known technology; and,

• any other matter of importance.

Though the City of Iqaluit submitted the application directly to the NIRB in November 2012, the review board couldn’t start screening it immediately.

That’s because — under Nunavut’s regulatory rules — the review board must first receive a formal referral from an “authorizing agency.”

They didn’t get such a referral until July 25, 2013 — from the Nunavut Water Board.

Around the same time, NIRB staff found the city’s proposal did not contain enough information for them to do a proper screening and asked Iqaluit to provide additional information.

After a series of delays, the city provided all the required information by mid-July 2014.

You can use a web browser to find numerous documents related to the Iqaluit water licence from this section of the NIRB public registry.

If you have a dedicated FTP client, you can find the documents by going to the active screenings area located at ftp.nirb.ca.

The documents include the city’s new waste management plan, its current decommissioning plan for the West 40 dump and documents related to water and sewage treatment.