After months of sitting as an idle eyesore, work is ramping up again on the years-behind-schedule and billions-over-budget North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is good.
Amid all the finger pointing at Metro Vancouver over who is to blame for the cost overruns and who should be on the hook to pay for them, it’s become lost on a lot of folks that, at some point, we do need a fully armed and operational sewage plant.
To be clear, it has still not been explained to our satisfaction how Metro Vancouver allowed the project to get so far off track.
That lack of transparency combined with bitterness over the boondoggle and news about the runaway remuneration for Metro’s directors and committee members has some questioning the legitimacy of the regional governance model entirely.
We will defend it.
Providing clean drinking water and flushing toilets to Western Canada’s most populous region is not a small task. The elected leaders who oversee that deserve to be compensated. And the fiasco on West First Street isn’t the norm for the regional government. Unless we’re going to have each municipality building and paying for its own water supply and sewage treatment infrastructure, we’re all in this together.
But Metro Vancouver’s leadership needs to read the room here, show some contrition, make some very public steps to reign in discretionary spending and ramp up transparency.
The reputation of the regional authority is what underlies its ability provide the most basic but critical infrastructure we need. And we can’t have that flushed down the drain.
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