With record dry weather and ongoing Stage 3 water restrictions, Burnaby’s director of engineering says the city’s bylaws need a tune-up when it comes to water.
City staff plans to go to council in the near future to suggest bylaws around water-restriction enforcement be tightened, Leon Gous told the NOW last week.
“We’re probably going to take a report to council at some point, probably even soon-ish, just to say to differentiate in our bylaw between the four stages and have different fines for them because at the moment we’ve basically got one fine across the board,” he said.
The engineering director said he would like to see fines escalate with each stage “to convey the seriousness” of the issue.
Since Metro Vancouver – the body responsible for the region’s drinking water – started imposing restrictions this summer, Gous said the city has gotten about 140 complaints per day about residents flouting the rules.
In the week-and-a-half after Stage 3 restrictions were put in place July 21, the city fielded 350 complaints.
As of Friday, however, officials had written only about 60 warning letters and issued no fines, but Gous said staff need time to investigate each case to weed out “harassment complaints.”
“It’s a little bit more involved for a fine because we actually have to see the offence to fine,” Gous said.
About four works crew staff, usually responsible for tasks like painting fire hydrants, are now working fulltime to respond to water complaints.
Despite the barrage of complaints, Gous said Burnaby residents are “probably no worse than the rest” in the Metro region.
“A lot of it’s a bit of education, especially when Stage 3 followed Stage 2 so closely,” he said. “The rules on Stage 2 were still being, I guess, absorbed when Stage 3 hit, so we think a lot of it’s education. So I don’t think we’re doing particularly bad. I don’t think we feel that there’s just a general disregard for it out there.”
Special watering permits for residents applying nematodes to their lawns to treat chafer beetles have complicated the issue in Burnaby, Gous said, with some residents calling in complaints about neighbours who have the special three-week exemptions.
Unlike some jurisdictions that simply cancelled all permits, Gous said Burnaby decided to honour all permits issued before the Stage 3 restrictions came into effect.
Metro Vancouver is not very likely to move to Stage 4 restrictions, according to Gous, but he predicts the region could stay under Stage 3 into October.
The city’s water infrastructure, meanwhile, is not threatened by the record-dry conditions, he said.
His department has stopped flushing most waterlines in the city to conserve water, but flushing continues in certain dead-end sections of the system where water quality is known to be an issue.
“From an engineering perspective, there would be a concern if we couldn’t do that, because we’d have health concerns, but, of course, these type of health concerns tend to outrank most other usages,” Gous said.
He said the city is collecting the water used for flushing in tankers and using it to water local boulevards.
