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Duelling utility motions before council today

One aims to please skeptics, other seeks delay of vote

By: Bartley Kives

Posted: 07/22/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Two competing utility motions are heading to the floor of Winnipeg city council today -- one to make a stand-alone water-and-sewer corporation more palatable to skeptical city councillors, and the other to put off the vote until September.

The final city council meeting before a six-week summer break will be dominated by a debate over a plan to dissolve Winnipeg's water-and-waste department in favour of a new agency that would assume responsibility for water, sewer, garbage and recycling services, and possibly produce green power.

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The plan also calls for the utility to make sewage-treatment deals with neighbouring municipalities and form some sort of "strategic partnership" with a private engineering consortium to complete up to $1 billion worth of sewage-plant upgrades and combined sewer replacements in Winnipeg.

Both these ideas have sparked concern inside and outside city hall since the utility's business plan was unveiled late last month. Unions, activists and council's left-leaning opposition fear Winnipeg may lose control over essential services and have derided the "strategic partnership" for being vague and contradictory.

Today, St. Vital Coun. Gord Steeves and St. Norbert Coun. Justin Swandel will try to add three new recommendations to the plan in the hopes of creating more of a consensus at city council.

For starters, they want to ensure any deal struck between the utility and bedroom communities around Winnipeg will take the developmental concerns of all the municipalities involved into account.

They also want council to retain control over garbage and recycling policy -- an amendment demanded by Charleswood Coun. Bill Clement, who feared the utility would try to create user fees for garbage pickup.

Their third new recommendation calls for any "strategic partnership" agreement to come before council as part of the utility's annual business plan. Steeves said more specific language about the proposed partnership would be impossible to create, as the city does not yet know precisely what form that partnership would take.

This language will not appease River Heights Coun. John Orlikow and Fort Rouge's Jenny Gerbasi, who have authored a separate motion to put off the utility vote until city staff get a chance to clarify the business plan and consult with the public.

"We've spent $1 million on this business plan and it's contradictory. It's not appropriate to make huge amendments on the fly," Gerbasi said.

Gerbasi and Swandel each claim they are speaking for "ordinary people" with their competing motions. Gerbasi said she doesn't know of any citizen who supports the utility proposal, while Swandel said everyone he's spoken to likes the idea, once he gets a chance to explain it.

The council chamber is expected to be nearly full when the meeting begins at 9:30 a.m.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 22, 2009 A3

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