New waste water regulations mean higher costs for the North

Engineers and government officials want to better manage waste water in the North — and setting the same waste water management standards for every northern community could do the trick, they think.

But this is proving to be a challenge.

That’s because every northern community is different, said Ken Johnson, a consulting engineer, Nov. 19 at the Iqaluit “Our Water, Our Land, Our Life” conference for water operators and treatment specialists from across the North.

There’s been some progress made in producing a uniform set of regulations, which all northern communities could adopt. But it’s been a struggle to ensure those regulations stay fair and sustainable, Johnson said.

Some communities are already worried about the tab of complying with those new regulations, he said.

“The risk and fear for smaller communities throughout the North is that, in order to comply with new regulations set out by the federal government, their municipal taxes may have to rise considerably or the cities risk falling into bankruptcy,” he said.

That’s what happened in Dawson City, Yukon, where the courts ordered the town to put an effective wastewater management system into place.

Dawson City could count on $25 million from Ottawa to build the new treatment plant it needs.

But its municipal government shuddered over $300,000 to $400,000 annual operating costs, which would be passed on to the town’s 2,000 full-time residents.

Communities in the North generally rely on lagoons for wastewater treatment because lagoons are relatively simple to operate and rely on natural processes to treat the wastewater, Johnson said.

If there’s any good news for communities, it’s that some communities may only need to add plastic berms to their existing lagoons to comply with the new regulations, he said.