FRIDAY OCT 7, 2016
VOL. 42, NO. 85
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including GST
Watch for more online at: WWW.BOWENISLANDUNDERCURRENT.COM
Applefest preview
What lies ahead in this annual love-in for local apples
Slo-pitch
Sandy Bay beach
Season wrap-up
Bylaw enforcement moves forward
Infrastructure grant awarded to research on-island compost facility MERIBETH DEEN EDITOR
From left: Elizabeth Beach with baby Amelia, Nurse Andrea Firth, Leila Mensouri with son Maxim Leonard. Nurse Andrea Firth works with Vancouver Coastal Health and is making regular visits to Bowen Island to offer medical support and advise. Her next visit to Bowen Island will be on October 14th, to Family Place. Meribeth Deen, photo
Governments announce extra funding for clean water projects across the province MERIBETH DEEN EDITOR
Towards then end of last week’s Union of BC Municipalities conference in Victoria, ministers from the Federal and Provincial governments announced that an additional $450 million will be put towards community water and wastewater systems across British Columbia. Bowen Island Municipal Council Alison Morse says that it is unclear whether plans to build a water treatment plant on Bowen could benefit from this. “There are 35 projects they’ve already approved for this funding,” says Morse. “We have already submitted an application for funding under the Build Canada program, but at a meeting last Thursday we were told that there will be a small window of opportunity to apply for this new funding. Also
the project under consideration needs to be completed by March of 2018. If we qualified for this money, we don’t know that we could get it done in time.” The Build Canada funding that Bowen has currently applied for would require the municipality to cover one-third of the project costs, with the provincial and federal governments covering the other two thirds. The new funding would require the municipality to cover 17 percent of the costs, with the province covering 33 percent and the federal government covering 50 percent. Vancouver Coastal Health has stated the current system of treatment for Cove Bay water is inadequate, and has set a number of standards that must be met before any expansion of the system is allowed. The projected cost of building a water treatment plant on Bowen Island is close to $6 million.
On the fifth and final day of last week’s Union of BC Municipalities conference in Victoria, the Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development, Peter Fassbender announced that Bowen Island has been awarded a $10,000 grant to be put towards further research on the creation of a local facility to process Bowen’s green waste. Last spring, the Solid Waste Resource Advisory Committee presented a report on the possibility for such a facility to council. Local engineer Pete Taggart was chair of this committee, and has worked on this issue since roughly 2011. “I was part of a committee known as SWARMAC [Solid Waste & Resource Management Advisory Committee] that was charged with making improvements to the way we deal with solid waste on Bowen. The green bin program, started in 2013, came out of that,” says Taggart. “We now divert 70 percent of what we throw away from the landfill, and that is something I think Bowen should be quite proud of. Now though we’ve got a good feel for composting with lots of good data from Bowen waste, figuring out a way to process that on-island is the next logical step.” The Solid Waste Resource Advisory Committee has explored four different composting technologies that might be feasible on Bowen Island, and proposed a number of possible locations including the recycling depot land and lot 1, beside the gas station. In their report, they say that Bowen Island produced 430 tonnes of organic waste in 2015, and with population growth, they see that number growing to 700 tonnes. An on-island composting facility, they say, could reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent. They also predict that there will be a positive impact on local employment, which would include an increase in market gardening. “These numbers, and other aspects of our research need to be verified by someone who is an expert in this field,” says Taggart. “We also need to do public outreach and consultation on the issue. That is what we are calling phase two of this project, and we have come up with a cost of $20,000 to do it.” When these findings were presented to council in June, it was decided that if the committee were successful in obtaining the $10,000 infrastructure grant, the municipality would consider covering the remaining $10,000 for research and outreach. Taggart says that he has stepped down from the Solid Waste Resource Advisory Committee to make room for someone who might be more oriented towards the public consultation side of this work.
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