Imprudent spending
Re: Nitrogen must go: province, July 23.Kudos to your two reporters who wrote about the advisability of forcing city of Winnipeg taxpayers to endure the expense of eliminating nitrogen from sewer effluent in the process of wastewater treatment. This story is correct. This is not at all a prudent use of taxpayers' money. This body of research has its roots in the cleaning up of the Great Lakes where scientists found out that even if nitrogen were completely eliminated from the effluent stream, the nitrogen would simply be obtained from the air to create algae blooms. Scientists even took the studies as far as dividing lakes in half and testing phosphorus and nitrogen combined versus only phosphorus and in the end found no change in the damage caused. This discovery led to vast reduction in costs and vastly sped up the time it took to clean up those lakes.
I would encourage these two reporters to follow this line of investigation as I feel the issue bears even more scrutiny when one considers that the citizens of Winnipeg will be paying up to $2 billion over the next two decades to upgrade a system and the result will likely be only a trace reduction in the amount of phosphorus flowing into the lake.
As taxpayers and citizens, we can do better, a lot better in my opinion, with the expenditure of this money. We could use some assistance in trying to avoid the drastic rate increases that will go along with trying to comply with the provincial order to do these upgrades.
Coun. GORD STEEVES
St. Vital Ward
Winnipeg
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