Phosphorus compliance is long overdue

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/03/2022 (1483 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE City of Winnipeg’s water and waste department has once again publicly stated that it is not able to achieve phosphorus compliance at the North End Water Pollution Control Centre (NEWPCC) to protect Lake Winnipeg.

On March 3, two brief letters were innocuously published on the Manitoba government’s online registry of environmental assessments. Together, these letters represent the culmination of nine months of work by city engineers and provincial regulators to arrive at a plan to address ongoing non-compliance with phosphorus limits at the North End plant.

Guess what? No plan.

Quick recap: the city’s largest wastewater treatment plant is not compliant with the provincial phosphorus limit of 1.0 mg/L, set 17 years ago, in 2005. An interim phosphorus-reduction solution proposed by the Lake Winnipeg Foundation (LWF) was approved last year. However, the city says this will only reduce phosphorus to 2.5 mg/L because of limited biosolids capacity in the plant’s aging infrastructure.

Now, that aging infrastructure needs to be replaced. With the detailed design of new high-capacity biosolids facilities scheduled to start this year, the city has the opportunity to meet the 1.0 mg/L phosphorus limit using the approved interim solution.

With three levels of government poised to fund this critical infrastructure project, phosphorus compliance can be fully and proactively integrated into the detailed design and construction of the new facilities from the ground up.

Except none of the people in charge of our public services seems at all interested in making that happen.

On Dec. 29, 2021, City of Winnipeg engineers responded to a provincial request from May 2021 to “submit an assessment of options to enhance interim phosphorus reduction to meet a phosphorus limit in effluent of 1.0 mg/L following construction and commissioning of the upgraded biosolids facilities.”

The city’s Dec. 29 letter provides no defensible analysis, and zero commitment to use the opportunity of new biosolids facilities to address the plant’s decades-long phosphorus pollution. Instead, city engineers fall back on the same old excuse: not enough sludge capacity.

To be clear: Winnipeg’s water and waste department, with this letter, is projecting the functional inadequacy and regulatory non-compliance of municipal wastewater infrastructure that hasn’t even been designed yet – let alone built.

(Also worth flagging: this brand-new, $550-million facility has a “design life” to 2037. It won’t even be completed till 2029 — that’s a working life of eight years, at a cost of half a billion dollars.)

Coming hot on the heels of the Free Press’s compelling and concerning reports of incompetence and/or corruption in the City’s traffic branch (Feb. 19-26), this latest NEWPCC response from the city calls to mind Canadian Taxpayers Federation prairie director Todd McKay’s comments.

“Very rarely is (this) a problem in only one place,” says McKay. “And we’ve seen enough problems at city hall in Winnipeg over time that we know it’s very, very unlikely this infection is only in one appendage.”

We will all undoubtedly have to wrestle with this larger issue in the 2022 civic election campaign. For now, though, it’s way past time to get serious about NEWPCC phosphorus compliance. It’s time for provincial regulators to stop accepting excuses and stop granting extensions.

Manitoba’s environmental approvals branch took a full two months to respond to the city’s letter, finally concluding the letter did not meet NEWPCC license conditions. But rather than upholding its 2005 phosphorus limit, the province equivocates.

The provincial response asks the city to again assess “phosphorus reduction to as low as the 1.0 mg/L effluent phosphorus limit.”

Why is phosphorus compliance being left to the discretion of the city? At what point will the province actually address 20 years of non-compliance from the single largest source of phosphorus to Lake Winnipeg?

Provincial water legislation and environmental licensing are now overseen by Environment Minister Jeff Wharton, a longtime resident of Winnipeg Beach on the shores of Lake Winnipeg. Under his leadership, it’s time to change the NEWPCC licence – to set down in writing the clear expectation that the 1.0 mg/L limit will be achieved through biosolids facilities upgrades.

The detailed design process for NEWPCC’s new biosolids facilities will soon be underway. Based on the bureaucratic exchange that took place earlier this month, this design will cement in place an incredibly expensive and farcically ineffective piece of infrastructure – leaving Winnipeggers stuck with the price tag and Manitobans around the lake stuck with the dangerous consequences of failed environmental protection.

Alexis Kanu is executive director of the Lake Winnipeg Foundation.