Most anyone who has been listening to Snow Lake rhetoric of late, will realize that housing development, cottage lot expansion, sewer and water infrastructure, paving … pretty much everything to do with the community reaching its growth potential, hinges upon a new sewage treatment plant.

Snow Lake’s town council realized this several years ago and put into motion the process that will address it. Nonetheless, like the progression of building and paying for our new water treatment plant, this course of action is broad, prolonged and costly.

“The council has just looked at a pre-design report,” Jeff Precourt, the town’s chief executive officer noted in a late January discussion of the plant. “They have approved a draft of it and it will be going to environmental licensing.” The licensing process could take anywhere from three to six months and from there it goes to the final design stage, where the blueprints are drawn up. “We are hoping to be at that point in the project by the end of 2010,” Precourt added confidently. “Everything should be organized and ready by then.”

There are six stages to the process of acquiring Snow Lake’s new plant, and they all fall within a timeline. They are: Assessment (May 2008), pre-Design (December 2009), environmental licensing (current phase), final design (tentatively by December), construction (tentatively May 2011 to May 2012), and commissioning/performance testing/substantial completion (August 2012). The estimated total capital cost including contingencies and PST is $6.4 million.

When the current treatment system was designed and put into use in the mid-1980s, the council of the day bought a bit of a pig-in-a-poke. Called the Cowatt System, it was one of only two in existence. After several years in operation it was easy to tell why there weren’t more of them. The wastewater from the community of Snow Lake is comparatively dilute as opposed to other locals, and this caused havoc with the Cowatt System. The new plant will be tailored to handle the waste going through it on that basis. “A lot of thought went into it and the engineers spent a good deal of time in discussion on it,” said Precourt. “It is tried and true technology and similar to what a lot of other communities are using.”

The new system will incorporate rotating biological contactors or RBC’s, which are assembled in the wastewater tanks and are partly submerged for biological treatment of wastewater. The rotation of the contactors allows the micro-organisms on them to come in contact with the organic substances in the water and air. The process enables degradation of the organic compounds in the wastewater.

In addition to the design and licensing of the plant, another consideration is how it will be paid for. Precourt says that the town hasn’t dug too deeply into this aspect as yet. They are currently working on the 2010 budget and as plant construction will not begin until at least 2011, capital estimates will not be included in those deliberations. “We have 2010 to figure out how that is going to work,” Precourt said about funding options. “At this point we are focusing just on the construction side of it, trying to get all of that environmental licensing in place.”

Nevertheless, Precourt and the mayor headed recently to Winnipeg to meet with provincial government ministers to discuss implementation of the sustainable plan, a big part of which is the sewage treatment plant. “Everything hinges on the sewage treatment plant, so it will be interesting to see where the support will come from,” Precourt said. “Hopefully the three sectors of government: municipal, provincial and federal as well as the mining industry can all come together and make it happen.”