In the sun-parched Okanagan, water is a precious resource, just as it is in many other parts of western North America.
As populations increase, farming and water-consuming industries intensify, the demand for water will become ever greater.
At the same time, global climate change is affecting rainfall, glaciers and river flows.
Yet British Columbia’s system for tracking water use is an antiquated relic of the 20th century.
It’s a paper-based system using dubious data, or simply not recording how sources such as groundwater are consumed.
Water in B.C. is a precious resource that is poorly managed because no one knows how much water is actually being used and who uses what amount.
Over the past three years, the Okanagan Basin Water Board (OBWB) has been pioneering the B.C. Water Use Reporting Centre (WURC) which uses 21st century technologies to track water consumption.
Now the OBWB is calling on the provincial government to expand this local pilot project to the entire province, possibly by establishing an autonomous provincial water commission.
The idea was outlined recently in a letter from OBWB Chair Doug Findlater to Steve Thompson, minister of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO) and in a briefing paper sent to Thompson and Environment Minister Mary Polak.
Reporting of licensed water use in B.C. is ineffective if done at all, OBWB argues.
“About four or five years ago, we did a sophisticated supply and demand study of water,” says Nelson Jatel, water stewardship director with the OBWB.
“The data that we needed to do a really good job was actually quite poor. Much of the information for how much water was used by a given utility was done sort of on the back of a matchbox and it was difficult to collect. There weren’t long-term records and it wasn’t in one central repository.”
The accuracy of the information available was also questionable, said Jatel.
Water users would, for example, be licensed to take 1,000 litres of water and every year they would consistently report having used 990 litres.
“That’s one of the fallacies with the current reporting system,” he said. “It doesn’t actually relate to reality.”
Use of groundwater, an increasingly important source of water, has also not been systematically tracked.
The provincial government in March introduced Bill 18, the Water Sustainability Act, making improvements in several key areas of water stewardship and management, including the measuring and reporting of water use in the province.
Homeowners and small businesses connected to municipal water systems would not be directly affected by licensing and reporting requirements, but their local government or licensed water supplier would be required to measure and report water use under Bill 18.
The requirements of the bill could make a modernized and accurate tracking system essential.
And this raises the question of whether it should be controlled and run by a provincial government ministry or by an autonomous commission as the OBWB is recommending.
“It makes the conversation definitely relevant,” says Jatel. “We think this discussion paper is a great opportunity for us to put this on the table as an option for improving water services here in the Okanagan. It matters more to us because we’re such a dry region.”
The OBWB’s discussion paper that was sent to the provincial ministers discussed three options, but supported a proposal for a new B.C. water commission to streamline water use reporting and connect water license fees with water management needs.
The other two options discussed were to establish a new Water Use Reporting Centre administered within FLNRO or maintaining the current water licensing and paper-based reporting system.
Jatel acknowledges that the province may prefer to run water reporting under FLNRO and he concedes that an independent commission “is not really intended to be a silver bullet, but kind of a conversation starter.”
The worst option, he says, would be to maintain the status quo.
The OBWB used the accounting firm Grant Thornton to prepare a business case for the idea of a new B.C. water commission.
This independent commission would be self-funded and would be able to provide grants for water projects.
There would only be a need to increase current water license fees slightly, adding less than a dollar per year to residential water bills.
The new commission would employ a staff of 10 to provide core services and there would be no cost to the province’s general revenue, the OBWB says.
It would have enough money left over to fund a sustainable water management grant program of about $5 million a year.
Start-up costs for the commission would be $2.3 million and ongoing annual costs afterwards would be about $1.75 million, OBWB says.
FLNRO currently doesn’t have the management framework to meet the needs of the new Water Sustainability Act, OBWB says.
A commission, using water use reporting software developed in the Okanagan would provide that.
In addition to the Okanagan, Nanaimo also has joined in the pilot WURC, which uses this software.
This software supports groundwater, surface water and agricultural water electronic reporting and has proven very effective.
“Other provinces and states have recognized online water use reporting as an efficient and cost-effective method to collect and manage water use data,” says OBWB’s briefing note to the provincial ministers.
“We think this is one useful way to have a discussion about how to provide better services including groundwater monitoring, groundwater licensing and all these things that have now come into play because of Bill 18,” said Jatel.
“There’s going to need to be ramping up of some kind of service delivery for these things, and we think this is a really good entrant into that discussion about how we do this the best.”
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
