Silly sewage talk requires more sense

Today’s unsavoury topic — poop news. Few of us like to think what happens after we flush the toilet . . . and I know you’re already wondering what’s on the comics page.

But wait! I peeked — Dagwood’s not on his game today.

And anyway, this is a snappy tale about fantastically costly and dubiously necessary infrastructure, remarkably incurious city councillors, and of course, given the subject matter, bad jokes.

“You did tell us you were ‘flushing’ out the details. That’s when we started chuckling,” Coun. Gail Given giggled at Monday’s meeting, drawing her attention to a city engineer’s unfortunate slip of the tongue when he was describing how a process called anaerobic digestion might be needed at Kelowna’s sewage treatment plant.

Digestion and sewage are two words that ought never be mixed together, and one wonders if they’re coupling is purposeful, an attempt to raise the ick factor and quickly steer the political conversation onto other, more fragrant topics.

But this process — which does indeed involve the eating of poop by micro-organisms — could cost Kelowna as much as $50 million. It’s under consideration as a way of reducing the amount of treated organic material produced by the sewage plant.

At the very outset of deliberations about what could easily become the city’s costliest project ever is when you might expect city councillors to ask some hard questions.

Like, what other cities of Kelowna’s size use this process at their sewage plants?

Or, what are the real estimated costs to apparent alternatives, like simply expanding the storage capacity of a composting facility now used by Kelowna and Vernon? (A throwaway line in the report blithely states that too would cost “tens of millions” but there is no evidence offered to support this.)

Instead, Given and other councillors were already saying Monday that anaerobic digestion was likely the only way forward, that the stated risks of making the plant smellier than ever should be brushed aside, and that everyone who loved science should certainly support this initiative.

So, basically, right when they should have been defending the interests of taxpayers, councillors were already throwing them under the bus.

It shouldn’t be this way. And in the mid-1990s, in the wake of true crisis in Kelowna involving poop, it wasn’t.

In August 1996, an estimated 10,000 people in Kelowna suffered from vomiting, nausea, fever, and diarrhea attributed to an outbreak of cryptosporidium, likely caused by cow feces, in the water supply.

In the immediate aftermath of the outbreak, one option facing council was to spend $44 million on an ozone-based water treatment system. It would have boosted a typical homeowner’s annual water bills by more than $300.

It would have been easy for the council-ofthe-day to accept the officials’ insistence the project was necessary. Instead, they declined to be rushed into anything, asked for alternatives, and wound up choosing a $5 million ultraviolet light treatment system that has given Kelowna clean and safe water ever since.

The project under consideration now won’t in any way improve the quality of water released from the sewage treatment plant, which is already said to be almost drinkable.

It will reduce the volume of treated solid material, meaning less of it has to be trucked to the composting site in the North Okanagan. So there’s some savings on trucking costs, and I’m sure the people who’ve chosen live around that long-established site will appreciate a less smelly neighbour.

But already, notable progress has been made to reduce unsold compost material at the North Okanagan site, basically by giving it away for next to nothing to North Okanagan farmers. So the over-capacity problem seems to be diminishing.

What the anaerobic digestion process could also do is increase the smells wafting from the Kelowna sewage treatment plant. Two UBC Okanagan researchers who’ve looked into anaerobic digestion say this is precisely part of the reason why many other cities haven’t deployed the system at their sewage plants.

Nevertheless, council on Monday blithely gave the greenlight to staff to spend $300,000 to keep moving towards the possible installation of anaerobic digestion. A decision on whether to actually proceed will rest with whoever’s elected to city council this October.

Let’s hope that bunch is more inclined than this bunch — which has already increased municipal taxes 16 per cent in the past four years — to ask questions about the necessity and expense of massive city undertakings and not — ha ha! — flush money away. Really, there’s nothing funny about that. Ron Seymour is a Kelowna Daily Courier reporter.