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‘WHAT WENT WRONG?’
Councillor calls for audit as taxpayers face huge sewage plant bill JANE SEYD
jseyd@nsnews.com
While North Shore taxpayers are still absorbing the sticker shock of cost estimates for the new wastewater treatment plant, one North Vancouver politician is calling for an independent review after it was revealed project costs have ballooned to $3.86 billion.
District of North Vancouver Coun. Catherine Pope said she was stunned to learn of the scale of the sewage plant project budget hike and thinks taxpayers on the North Shore deserve to know what happened. “I want to know why it took three years for Metro to determine there were serious problems with this project,” she said. “We need to know as taxpayers what went wrong and why.” Metro Vancouver released the updated costs for the sewage treatment plant project March 22, revealing the revised project costs had grown more than $2.8 billion from the last budget of $1.058 billion
in 2021. The new cost projections come after a special task force was struck to examine problems facing the project and make recommendations to the board, which approved the new budget in a closed-door meeting. North Shore taxpayers are expected to be on the hook for a substantial part of that. In a worst-case scenario, the increased costs to “average” households in North and West Vancouver has been pegged at $725 per year for the next 30 years – or more than $21,000 per household. But Pope said it’s unfair for Metro to ask North Shore residents to pay for problems they had no knowledge of, and little say in. “I think it’s completely unacceptable,” she said. “North Shore taxpayers can’t be saddled with these mistakes made at the Metro level.” Several residents with experience in large infrastructure projects have Continued on A34
Coun. Catherine Pope of the District of North Vancouver is calling for an independent audit of the skyrocketing budget for Metro Vancouver’s problem-plagued North Shore Wastewater Treatment Plant project, which now comes with a price tag of nearly $4 billion. PAUL MCGRATH / NSN