NCC spends $205,000 on three drinking fountains

As part of job at Dow's Lake, agency paid $160,000 for 240 metres of trench work

There is water, water everywhere at scenic Dow's Lake, but it cost $205,000 to get a little drink.

According to newly-released documents, the National Capital Commission has spent that sum of public money to replace three drinking water fountains at Commissioners Park, the wellknown tulip haven that rings the lake near Carling Avenue and Preston Street.

The water is available only in season, about six months a year.

Access-to-information wizard Ken Rubin asked the Crown corporation for documents related to the work, mostly completed in the fall of 2020, and was handed 296 pages, including dozens of photographs and many scaled engineering drawings.

The paper trail also sheds light on why the NCC has such a hard time keeping the taps flowing at about 45 outdoor fountains along its extensive pathway system.

The short answer? The underground pipes fall apart — there are long stretches of them to reach municipal water service — and it cost the earth to replace them.

(Among the documents was an email from a thirsty jogger who wondered why fountains along a section of the Rideau Canal had not worked for SIX years, sitting there covered in a plywood box.)

According to invoices from two different fiscal years, the bulk of the cost ($160,000, mostly to BG Excavating Ltd.) was for excavating about 240 metres of trench, 1.2 metres deep and wide. The rest was to different firms for design, engineering services, asphalt, signage and the like.

But nothing is simple in a government town, especially when it comes to environmental protection above and below ground.

It turns out much of the park was built on a former landfill and a study in 2005 found all kinds of contaminants in the soil — glass, bricks, ash, nasty chemicals.

But the samples taken were not exactly where the water pipes to the fountains were located.

So, was there any hazard in digging a trench? Should the disturbed dirt simply be put back, or removed by a licensed operator, to a licensed landfill, at considerable extra expense? Or could it be piled up, tested on site, put back in the trench, then covered with clean soil and sod?

Oh, the questions. Oh the meetings. (“…a leachate test as per O. Reg. 558” was a phrase that kept popping up.)

And perhaps nothing better illustrates the red-tape world the NCC lives in — not all of its own doing, we should add — than a discussion about whether the work could be done during bird-nesting season.

“Jaylen,” begins a note to the in-house engineer, “undertaking construction in April or after the Tulip Festival (summer) entails the requirement to undertake a bird nest survey two days prior to commencing work and the potential risk of having to postpone the works if an active nest of a protected bird is identified along the alignment,” was the input from an NCC environment officer.

(Some of you will remember the Killdeer standoff at Bluesfest in 2018 when the NCC protected four eggs in a ground nest near the main stage of the music festival on the lawn of the Canadian War Museum. The eggs eventually hatched, only to have one of the chicks get run over by traffic as the adults unwisely crossed — oh why did they? — “to the other side” of Wellington Street.)

The string of emails indicate NCC staff are alive to the problem of broken water fountains, a defect that frustrated residents frequently bring up.

“To finish off this thread on a worse note: our last 2 drinking fountain lines have failed this week,” senior lands manager Mike Muir wrote in May 2018, of the state of things at Commissioners. “There are no functioning drinking fountains in the park until we conduct major repairs, hopefully later this year.”

A check in the summer of 2018 found 11 of 23 fountains on the pathway system were not working, but an update in 2019 said nine of 12 were functional.

The NCC responded Thursday that the $205,000 work was not just to replace a couple of fountains, but was “the partial replacement of the park's water systems, including the potable water line and the water management control systems, along with three fountains.

“To note, the park has five seasonal drinking fountains, which are out of order because the water mains are at the end of their life cycle and are in need of significant repairs,” strategic communications adviser Dominique Huras replied.

The work is to be completed in May. And won't we all just drink to that?

JULIE OLIVER The National Capital Commission recently put in two drinking fountains at Commissioner's Park at Dow's Lake. The fountains, currently protected from the elements under grey boxes, came with a price tag of $205,000 — including $160,000 worth of work on trenches.