City council in Ottawa is looking at increasing water and wastewater rates by 10% in 2010 to address issues arising from aging infrastructure. This is in addition to a 4% municipal tax increase. The City has kept infrastructure spending flat for the last few years but now has major problems including sewage overflows into the Ottawa river. The Chairman of the City Council’s Planning and Environment Committee is quoted as saying “We can’t continue to pump sewage into the Ottawa River, that’s not acceptable to residents.”
I blogged earlier about a New York Times article that said in the last three years more than 9,400 of the US’s 25,000 sewage systems dumped untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the EPA. In New York the sewer system overflows just about every other time it rains.
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