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A P3 crapshoot at the sewage plant

I’m having a lot of trouble understanding our council’s decision to move forward with privatizing the design, construction and operation of Whistler’s waste water plant expansion.
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I’m having a lot of trouble understanding our council’s decision to move forward with privatizing the design, construction and operation of Whistler’s waste water plant expansion. I’m thinking of calling Ralph’s sister in Manitoba to explain it to me. She’s apparently either an authority or at least offers sage counsel on complex subjects.

Perhaps she could explain the whole alchemical process of turning people poo into gold. For much of human history, alchemists experimented, hoped and prayed for a foolproof methodology to convert base metals – lead for the most part – into gold. It was the cold fusion holy grail of the age.

Modern day alchemists have gone them one better, having evidently discovered a way of turning shit into gold. I’m baffled… but intrigued.

Of course, I’m skeptical as well. Any good magic act brings out the curious skeptic in me. I’m wondering where this poo profit comes from.

Let’s deconstruct this magic act. Undoubtedly there is some profit to be made in designing a sewage treatment plant. But just how much? I mean, Whistler isn’t the first place on Earth to build a sewage treatment plant or even an expansion of an existing plant. While it’s not like you can go down to Costco and buy a poo processor, it shouldn’t be all that difficult to hire a good civil engineering architectural firm to design one. Can’t be a windfall profit in the design stage, just a normal, doing business type of profit. The kind of profit rolled into an all-in-one design, build, operate contract.

Any good project construction company ought to make a reasonable profit building a treatment facility. If they didn’t, they’d soon go out of business. But again, it’s not like this is the very first one ever built. While I’m painfully aware of how under-supplied and over-demanded construction trades are these days with the Great Olympic™ Sinkhole sucking up everyone who can weld metal or wield a hammer, I’m willing to bet there are still firms out there who’d be happy to bid on a treatment plant expansion that provided them a reasonable profit for their labours.

So, let’s see… design, check… build, check… operate? Ah, operate. That must be where the real gold is. But where, exactly, is the profit in processing poop?

I realize there’s some money to be made in selling the processed solids – if you’re eating while you’re reading you might want to come back to this later – as high-test fertilizer. Many years ago, I hauled a couple of truckloads of, I believe the euphemism was, biosolids, up to where I’m living and spread them around the bare back yard. New grass seed sprouted almost immediately, so rich was this mixture. And after three days or so, the back of the house stopped smelling like a porta-potty on a hot day. But the muni stopped letting people reclaim their poop for free and I’m not certain exactly what happened to that revenue-generating proposition.

The point is, there’s limited profit to be made from selling the "product" of a waste treatment plant. So any operating profit worthy of attracting spirited bidding has to come from the difference between what the muni is going to pay over the course of the contract and the cost of operating the plant.

Now, unless the muni is a bumbling idiot – no cheap shots here, folks – the non-labour cost of operating a new, modern, efficient, yes even sustainable waste treatment plant is going to be about the same whether the muni operates it or some private enterprise operates it. So the profit boost must be coming from lower labour costs.

Now, how do you operate something like a poop plant and realize lower labour costs? Hire fewer operators? Hire less skilled operators? Pay them less? Provide fewer benefits? Hey, what is this? McSewage?

The fact is, this whole P3 thing is one big crapshoot – sorry, that one slipped out. The sole justification for this ill-advised course is, on the surface, saving money. But the track record of privatized waste treatment is spotty at best with some municipalities having realized savings and others having entered a Twilite Zone of no savings, no service and protracted legal proceedings to get rid of bad operators. Which future will be ours? Flip a coin.

When this issue first came up, council referred it to staff where, after study, it was recommended we not proceed. Thanks, but no thanks. Then the province entered the picture in the form of Partnerships BC, a thinly-disguised pet project of Rear-Entry Campbell to sell off pieces of public works to private operators. Depending on who you talk to – no one’s going on the record – there were, let’s call them friendly discussions, concerning Whistler’s waste water treatment expansion, financial tools, Olympic™ legacies and future cozy dealings. A little arm-twisting, a little friendly persuasion and voilà, a sudden change of heart.

There are lots of reasons going the P3 route on this project is a bad idea and there’s only one – two if you count the iron fist, velvet glove intimidation from Victoria – in its favour: the illusory, maybe we will and maybe we won’t, save money.

It’s a bad idea because waste water treatment is part and parcel of what governments – collections of people living together – are supposed to do. It’s a common good and a public utility. If the shit hits the fan, so to speak, and our treatment plant starts dumping something other than treated effluent into the Cheakamus we know who to hold responsible and everybody from the elected mayor and council to the municipal engineer to the plant operators will be scrambling like their jobs depended on it to get things fixed. If we have a private operator whose primary responsibility is to its shareholders, board of directors, overpaid CEO and battery of lawyers, we will most certainly wind up holding the shitty end of the stick. Soothing words from our councillors that they’ll simply terminate the contract are vacuous. We’ll all be dead and gone before that action finds its way through the courts.

It’s a bad idea because it’s almost impossible to unravel the relationship if it goes bad. It’s a bad idea because it calls into question the commercialization of other public utilities, despite what our esteemed counsel – presumably the same ones who couldn’t draft binding resale caps at Barnfield or bylaws for Nita Lake Lodge – says. It’s a bad idea because now, instead of a 20-year contract the council would have to put to a public referendum, they’re talking about rolling five-year contracts they can sneak in under the radar. It’s a bad idea because once we get into bed with a private company operating the waste water plant they will, as sure as spring follows winter, start angling for the water concession and dangling even more "savings" in front of our collective noses.

Frankly, if we need to privatize a public utility, I’m beginning to think council is the best place to start. We could outsource council, maybe bus in some even lower-paid workers from Squamish or buy a couple of magic 8-balls.

Or maybe just give Ralph’s sister a call.