East Gwillimbury council slams region over continued use of sewage lagoons until 2024

Yorkregion.com
May 6, 2016
By Sean Pearce

News that unpopular Holland Landing sewage lagoons are not scheduled to close down until 2024 has left a bad taste - and smell - in East Gwillimbury.

Council has likely taken its share of the heat over the past few weeks from disgruntled taxpayers and unanimously slammed the region’s decision at Tuesday’s council meeting.

Mike Rabeau, York Region director of capital planning and delivery for environmental services was the piñata as council members lined up for a swing.

“I find this situation with the ministry tying the Upper York Sewage Solutions with the closing of the lagoons distasteful,” Mayor Virginia Hackson said.

“Our community has been sold a bill of goods. We continue to say for years and years and years that this was going to be decommissioned.”

The region needs to keep the lagoons operational until the scheduled UYSS comes online in 18 years, so it can transfer the certificate of approval from the lagoons to the new sewage plant, Rabeau said.

Due to provisions of the Lake Simcoe Protection Act, there are no new sewage plants allowed on Lake Simcoe, so the region has to use the existing certificate from the lagoons for the new plant.

The good news, Rabeau said, is that the region is working to clean out the lagoon cells to try and mitigate the stench. But the decision didn’t sit well with council and the fact the detested lagoons will be sticking around until 2024.

“We need to find a way to get these things shut down,” Councillor James Young said.

“All pun intended, it stinks,” Councillor Tara Roy-DiClemente said.

In the town’s 2010 official plan, a policy stated the town would work with the region to decommission the Holland Landing lagoon system for sewage treatment as an essential first phase of town servicing.

And a 2005 regional transportation and works report confirmed the existing sewage lagoons were nearing the end of their lifecycle and would need to be decommissioned.

That was 11 years ago and they are still operational.

Council will inform the Environment Ministry it is an irresponsible move to tie the new sewage plant with keeping lagoons open.

The lagoons, original built in 1974, were to be a temporary solution to handle growth. The irony that a delay of the new sewage plant - needed to usher in more growth - is holding back the ultimate closure of inadequate sewage lagoons should not be lost, Hackson said.