SLPOA proposal re septics

Rem Westland | Apr 06, 2017

I am a former president of the Sharbot Lake Property Owners’ Association (SLPOA), former Environment Director with that organization, one-time member of a committee set up by Council to consider economic development options for Central Frontenac, and a former member of the Septic Re-Inspection (SRI) Committee. This letter is a call for Council to unanimously reconfirm its support for the SRI recommendations.

At the 2012 annual general meeting of the SLPOA when a mandatory septic re-inspection program was endorsed there was one dissenting vote: mine. I was not very popular at that meeting. My reasons included many of those listed by Craig Bakay in his recent editorial.

What Mr. Bakay fails to see is that the SRI, by listening to what people were saying and by reading the literature, achieved a significant change in direction. There are many in the CF lakefront property owners’ associations who don’t see it either.

The SRI is not recommending the mandatory re-inspection program that had been expected. Instead, it has recommended a licensing regime. The targets of the regime are professional pumpers/ haulers. There is nothing especially innovative about requiring professionals to be licensed.

The innovation lies in how licensed pumpers/haulers will work cooperatively with property owners and the municipal government, at little extra cost to anyone, to gather essential information.  

When licensed pumpers/haulers service septic systems they will enter information about those systems into municipal records. The location and performance of septic systems have an impact on lake water quality, drinking water and health, property values – and therefore the tax base – of one’s own and neighbouring properties, and so on. That accurate information about these systems is non-existent in CF today is inexcusable.

Yes, after five years the SRI recommendations call for the Council to undertake mandatory inspections of unreported properties and failing systems. But by then there will have been five years of education, and the number will be relatively low. The inspection and remediation program designed by the Council of the day will surely be appropriate for the concerns which affected citizens will then express. A call from an elected member of council to property owners in their respective jurisdictions, for example, may be good enough in most cases. In its research the SRI learned that gentle reminders were acted upon 80% of the time.

I take serious issue with Mr. Bakay’s assertion that the poorest among us are the least likely to attend to their septic systems. He owes his fellow citizens an apology. Money is not a determinant of common sense, capacity for self help, or concern about health. After five to ten years of a licensed system, if a member of Council calls or visits the property of one of his or her poorer constituents, I bet the property owner will pass inspection with flying colours…as long as common sense is the measure applied.

I take issue as well with a concluding implication by Victor Heese in his letter to this newspaper. The SRI focus was not lakefront owners.

We learned during SRI discussions that unattended septic systems become problems in places of greatest density. When my family moved into this area in 1973 we stepped into the front end of a serious water problem. The beach was closed to swimming. Water along the shores of the village could not be used. The congestion of poorly operating septic systems in the village itself required an expensive program of well drilling, septic repair and replacement (holding tanks), and other emergency steps. Accurate records will enable Council to nip issues like these, whether in town or in new developments on our lakes, in the bud.

When the SRI recommendations are implemented CF will have an answer to the RMFEO and the province: across-the-board mandatory re-inspection is unnecessary, labour intensive, and very expensive. It would take at least ten years, at four hundred inspections a year (which is a lot!), to complete such a program in CF. When such a program is finally completed, the first batch of inspections will already be ten years out of date.

The SRI recommendations offer a made-in-CF solution that will become the pride of rural Ontario. I look forward to learning that the vote in favour is unanimous.