Salt Spring’s largest water provider is ramping up its spending plans heading into fall, hoping to adopt next year’s budget by late October — and with more than $18 million in capital projects slated for 2026, the North Salt Spring Waterworks District (NSSWD) has an arguably full dance card.
The lion’s share of that record spending will be taken up by construction of a new water treatment plant at Maxwell Lake, now a $15-million project ultimately mandated by Island Health in 2023. The district remains hopeful some large portion of that plant’s funding will come from a Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund grant, although there has been no word on when — or whether — that grant might be approved.
The district also expects to advance the Duck Creek weir project in 2026 — a significant climate resiliency effort that for its part is already funded by provincial dollars. And an upgrade to the Crofton Road pump transfer station should, in the future, enable combining the similarly treated two “halves” of the district’s water system, adding or subtracting whenever the St. Mary or Maxwell Lake sides need to shift supply.
Perhaps the most immediately visible project, at least for some users, surrounds work on the aging water meters at customers’ property lines. Over the next four years, NSSWD expects to replace between 350 and 400 water meters each year, according to a proposed capital projects document, with a relatively modest $350,000 slated from the utility’s reserve funds to cover costs in 2026.
The meters in place aren’t reliably registering how much water is actually being delivered, according to a staff report to the NSSWD board Thursday, Aug. 28, creating uncertainty in conservation planning and what is likely an effective loss of revenue. The older equipment also requires significant staff time devoted to manual reading, which keeps them away from other tasks.
The new meters under consideration, according to operations director Ryan Moray, transmit data over cellular frequencies — prompting a question from district trustees on whether adequate network coverage existed throughout NSSWD’s service area.
Moray said the meters require little bandwidth to send out what are very simple messages back to the office or, in a pinch, to a nearby district employee.
“It’s not like streaming a movie, right?” said Moray. “It’s just a very small number being transmitted.”
NSSWD CAO Mark Boysen said manufacturers of the new meters also indicated there was a specific band on the cellular spectrum they used that tended to be “more available” than that used for most phone calls or text messages — he said he would have more information about that soon — and that even when there’s no signal, a “drive-by” with equipment to receive readings would be exponentially more efficient than reading meters manually.
District financial officer Tammy Lannan said the board could also consider reducing the water toll fee surcharge once the meter replacement program was completed and collecting user data became simpler.
“The fact is we’re not seeing the revenue we should, because it’s not capturing all the water [going through],” said Lannan. “With new meters, you can expect your [usage] bills to be higher.”
From a procedural perspective, islanders may soon see new clarity with respect to how water connections are approved — an issue the district has only recently been dealing with again after a 10-year connection moratorium was partially lifted earlier this year.
District trustees approved a bylaw revision specifying the use associated with those connections must be permitted “pursuant to Salt Spring Island’s Land Use Bylaw” — in other words, allowed by the Islands Trust.
“If they give approval to the zoning and the land use, then we should provide the water to that connection,” said Boysen. “It makes it really simple for us, and clearer for everyone.”
Boysen said new water service connections had “consumed” roughly 10 per cent of the available 300 multi-family-dwelling-unit-equivalent taps so far.