Blog wars, threatening phone calls - Toowoomba Water Futures ...

From the Courier Mail (emphasis added):

Waste not, water not

10 June 2006

Toowoomba is the first battleground in the recycled water debate, writes Brendan O’Malley

Blog wars, threatening phone calls, fiery debates in the council chambers. Welcome to the countdown to Toowoomba’s referendum on recycled drinking water.

For a city with a well-earned reputation for restrained, conservative values, life has suddenly become far more controversial since the community started grappling with the concept of pumping treated sewage into its main dam.

The debate gathered pace a fortnight ago when the council, led by Mayor Di Thorley, started a $460,000 ratepayer-funded advertising campaign which in the next seven weeks will splurge almost $7000 a day trying to convince 60,000 residents — many deeply conservative people from rural backgrounds — to become guinea pigs in the world’s most ambitious wastewater recycling scheme.

Opposition to the proposal is relying on a blog campaign, petitions and public meetings, one of which attracted 1000 people.

If a majority vote 'yes' on July 29, the equivalent of up to 11,000 Olympic swimming pools a year of sewage will be passed through a series of filters and ultraviolet disinfection equipment, pumped back into Cooby Dam, treated again and then sent flowing into kitchen taps, water fountains, showers and restaurants.

One drop out of every four will be recycled —25 times the level of the water in Singapore, the only other major urban area where wastewater is pumped directly into dams. And it will cost ratepayers $18 million for the privilege of reusing what they flushed down the toilet.

If the vote is 'no', then water charges could rise ninefold, Thorley warns, because the council simply cannot borrow the $69 million she says is needed for its share of the cost of building a pipeline to Wivenhoe Dam, the next most viable option.

Instead, the State Government would have to step in, forcing Toowoomba to buy water from it at bulk rates of between $3 and $5 for every 100 litres.

"We have to do something. What is my city doing carting buckets to water the garden? We’re not in the Third World," she said.

A Council study estimated the cost of alternatives other than recycling — bores tapping the Condamine River system; water from a coal seam gas plant near Chinchilla; swapping water with cotton farmers or damming Emu Creek — were too expensive.

Opponents within and outside council, including the Chamber of Commerce and Toowoomba’s wealthiest man Clive Berghofer say the proposal is potentially unsafe, unable to provide the city with enough water either in the short term or in 10 years, and is bad for the town’s public perception.

It is a quandary the rest of southeast Queensland will face if there is no significant rain in the Wivenhoe catchment next summer.

Premier Peter Beattie conceded last week that although topping up Wivenhoe was not government policy, it did remain an 'Armageddon solution', prompting a relieved Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman to say that 'the bogey man' was now out.

Newman’s water spokesman, Jane Prentice, said the Brisbane City Council’s priority was to provide recycled water for business users.

It planned to double the capacity of its reverse osmosis recycling facility at Brisbane’s Luggage Point sewage treatment plant and build new RO facilities at nearby Gibson Island and Wynnum treatment plants.

Most of the water would go to the Trade Coast precinct near the Brisbane Airport, the Swanbank, Tarong and Tarong North power stations and Brisbane Airport. "That still leaves us with 100 million litres of class A water from Luggage Point," Prentice said. "The longer-term suggestion is that should be connected to the Western Corridor pipeline, but if you’re going to pipe water (from there) into Wivenhoe, there are six councils using it, so it’s not just our decision."

Nothing will happen soon.

Toowoomba’s proposal does not come on line until 2011 at the earliest and it normally takes 18 months to build a reverse osmosis plant, so even industrial users in Brisbane will have to wait.

The first step, however, is winning over the public, which is why all eyes are on Toowoomba.

"I grew up on an orchard at Eukey, and some of my earliest memories are filling up kerosene tins from the creek and pulling them back up to the farm on a sled behind the horse," Thorley says. "Many people here have close ties to the land . . . you only have to drive five minutes and you’re in the country. I have faith this community will make the right decision."

Although the council has done private polling Cr Thorley is giving nothing away on how feeling is running.

She has a lot riding on the issue considering she wants to run for mayor again. She doesn’t rise to the bait when asked if other southeast Queensland land mayors and Premier Beattie have left her to make the running. Her council’s engineering director Kev Flanagan backs her up: "Di is carrying the load for the whole of Australia. Everybody is watching this referendum."

Thorley concedes it was a smart political move by local federal member, Ian Macfarlane, to ask Canberra to make a $23 million Commonwealth grant underwriting the project conditional on a referendum.

Whichever way the vote goes, Macfarlane can say it was not his fault.

He was a supporter until late August because the council assured him it had community support.

That was when the Citizens Against Drinking Sewage lobby group handed over the biggest petition he has ever seen.

"When 8000 signatures land on your desk it cements the view I’ve been getting that people have questions," he said. "This is four to five times as big as any petition I’ve seen in Toowoomba. As the local representative I can’t just blow that away and the risk we take is if the council is thrown out in 2008 we’re left with a white elephant."

Flanagan defends the council’s report into the alternatives, saying it was peer-reviewed by the Department of Natural Resources and Mines and independently costed.

He has had teams out drilling into the basalt aquifer under the city but says groundwater levels have been dropping since the 1960s, while Toowoomba’s position at the top of the Great Dividing Range makes pumping water from Emu Creek, Wivenhoe, or coal seam and bore sources north of the city prohibitively expensive.

He also has no doubts about the safety of recycled water, handing over a bottle of Singapore water for a taste test (it looks and smells good, but the taste is unusual for anyone used to chlorinated water).

Wastewater experts at The University of Queensland and interstate backed him up, telling The Courier-Mail there were so many layers in the purification process a failure effectively was impossible.

Anti-recycling campaigner Snow Manners, who claims to have done his own polling, is predicting a resounding 'no' vote.

"There is little economic sense in it, there have been no proper independent reports into the alternatives and they’re talking about closing Cooby Dam to fishing. This idea is full of holes."

Manners claimed the council had lost the plot on the issue.

He says he received a phone message threatening to extract 'an for an eye and a tooth for tooth'.

CADS spokeswoman Rosemary Morley also received a message warning her if she kept 'throwing rocks' they might fall on her head.

The debate has also created tensions within council.

Councillors could not even agree the wording of the referendum question, which now reads: 'Do you support the addition of purified recycled water to Toowoomba’s water supply via Cooby Dam proposed by Water Futures Toowoomba?'

"The question is rigged. People should be asked if they are in favour of recycling drinking water from the Wetalla wastewater plant but our amendment was voted down," Cr Lyle Shelton says.

"I’m very worried the community feeling is going with the council because of the misinformation in its education campaign, which is actually promotion of their yes case."

"Toowoomba has every option Brisbane has, including taking water from Wivenhoe which is only 30km from Cressbrook Dam, we just haven’t been told that."

The man who pushed through Cressbrook, Clive Berghofer, is not impressed with recycling either.

"People are already calling us Peewoomba. This is all about perception and those kind of perceptions can do a lot of harm," says Berghofer.

"It’s more than drinking it. The kids have to bath in it, you have to cook in it and we’ve got companies like Weis Icecreams and KR Darling Downs which will use this water."

"They’ve got competitors who could use it against them and customers in Japan who are very sensitive about chemicals."

The man on Australia’s top-200 rich list denies he has his own commercial interests in mind.

"I’m worth $280 million. I don’t care if I make another dollar."

In the meantime life without rain goes on.

A road sign on the outskirts of Toowoomba reminds people about Level Four water restrictions, as if anyone needs reminding out here.

People like pensioner Betty Sullivan, 77, and her daughter Debra Twidale continue to lug heavy buckets of water to their plants in an effort to keep them going.

By August even that will be illegal.

"We’re not entering the Carnival of Flowers this year. It was too much work last year for Mum, she was carrying 220 buckets a day," Debra says, surveying her front yard.

Maybe Toowoomba will have to stop calling itself the Garden City.