Sundre's council found itself last week in the difficult position of deciding to put on hold its plans to provide water and sewage services to the east side.
A motion to that effect was carried during the June 6 meeting following a discussion behind closed doors.
In a phone interview with the Round Up, Mayor Terry Leslie attributed the “hard call” to the fact the town's sewage system is far closer to capacity than previously estimated as recently as about two years ago.
“Once the town has implemented improvements to address both capacity and water quality issues it will be able to re-enter into discussions with Mountain View County with regards to providing both water and wastewater to Mountain View County landowners and residents,” Leslie wrote in a letter dated June 7 to Pat Eisler, president of the Tall Timber Leisure Park board of directors, which has for several years been working under the assumption the services would be installed.
The upgrades to the town's wastewater facility should increase its overall capacity to a population of 7,000 from 3,500, which will allow Sundre to service any future requests not only from within the municipality but the county as well, Leslie said.
“We regret that currently the Town of Sundre is unable to provide water and wastewater services to residents or businesses outside of the town's boundaries until the improvements are in place,” the mayor wrote in the letter.
“Apologies is all we can offer” to those outside the town's limits who anticipated being connected to its services, he said.
Although the temporary hold on connecting water and sewage services to the east side will leave a big question mark in the air for businesses like Tall Timber, which find themselves back to Square 1 after almost four years of planning, perhaps the development is a blessing in disguise.
Had the town's total capacity not been adequately reviewed, the situation might actually have been far worse if the project had prematurely gone ahead. One might only imagine the disastrous result of connecting services that the town doesn't have the capacity to process.
And it's not as though council has downplayed — or even worse been outright dismissive — of the issue. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Town officials have spent plenty of time investigating the matter and continue to do so. From design to completion, upgrading the wastewater treatment facility, which will likely cost more than $10 million, will take time.
“We're pressing forward as quickly as we can because we need a solution, but we don't want to rush to failure,” said Leslie.
Surely that's a sentiment everyone can agree on. As the old saying goes, measure twice, cut once.
— Simon Ducatel, editor
