Lindsay asks—

Hi Pat,

Do the New Westminster city bylaws allow me to install a grey water system in my bathroom where I can redirect, filter and retain shower water? I live on a steep hill (like many other residents!) and I would like, with the aid of gravity and waste water, to grow my garden responsibly. Currently, we are using buckets. A filtration system would allow us to store the water when we produce more than we need, and a three way valve from the washroom would maximize our efficiency.

Thank you!

Some people probably read the above and cannot imagine why someone would want to keep the water coming out of their shower drain. However, re-use of “grey water” (waste water that has not come in contact with sewage) is pretty common around the world outside of North America.

I have a family member that lives on a Gulf Island where groundwater resources are scarce, and she lived for years off of rainwater collected from her roof. It doesn’t rain much on the Gulf Islands, so she relied on a large storage tank, and careful conservation of water. She also had a spectacular vegetable garden, maintained almost completely from grey water that she recycled the old-fashioned way: collecting it in buckets instead of letting it run down the drain.

This simple method relies on a few things: using the water pretty much when you produce it so no storage is necessary (giving no time for water to fester and pathogens to grow) and careful selection of soaps and detergents to assure you aren’t spreading too much sodium, sulphates, boron, or other things bad for soil structure onto your garden. As kitchen water is sometimes used, there is an extremely small but non-zero risk of food borne illness transmitting to your root vegetables, but good kitchen hygiene can make this risk vanishingly small.

The storage thing is probably your biggest issue. Just filtering the hair, lint, and other cooties out of the water will not stop collected greywater from getting septic very fast. Once you have warmed it, volatilized the chlorine out of it, and added a little organic matter, that water is going to get gross. If you wish to store it, you will need to filter then treat the water, with something like UV or ozone or you will quickly have a smelly putrid mess.

But your question was whether our Bylaws allow it, and I would say it depends on the Bylaw you read. The Plumbing Bylaw says:

No person shall cause, suffer or permit the disposal of sewage, human excrement, or liquid wastes, in any place or manner except through and by means of an approved plumbing system, conforming to the British  Columbia Plumbing Code and this bylaw…

Grey water would follow under the category of Liquid Waste, so if the BC Building Code allows your pipe system, the City would. There have been some recent changes to the BC Building Code that do allow for two-pipe systems and some recycling of non-potable water, but you are going to need to get a Building Code expert to answer any questions around that.

However, the City also has a Sewerage and Drainage Bylaw that says, amongst other things:

13. Every owner shall ensure that:
(a) all Sewerage originating from any building located on such property owner’s  property is connected to and discharged into the Municipal Sewerage System, when such a system is available to the property;

“Sewerage” is defined in the same Bylaw to include:

waterborne Waste from the preparation and consumption of food and drink, dishwashing, bathing, showering, and general household cleaning and laundry;

which leads me to conclude that the way you are currently collecting buckets of grey water and dumping them on your garden is illegal.

Worse, the same Bylaw also states:

14. Holding tanks are not allowed on any property within the area of the City that has been designated as the Metro Vancouver’s Regional Growth Strategy – Urban Containment Area, and the City will not permit a Service Connection to a property that contains a holding tank and owners must remove all such holding tanks.

This would probably be a more useful restriction if the bylaw defined “Holding Tank”, which it doesn’t, but I would assume that a tank to hold grey water or liquid waste would qualify (and I am suddenly concerned about the rain water collection tanks I purchased from the City).

This brings me to my easiest conclusion. I would suggest if you were getting into a storage-of-water-program for your garden to reduce water wastage, build a larger-capacity rainwater collection system instead, avoid all the trouble with putrefaction of organics in the grey water, and let your grey water go efficiently to the treatment plant.

noni asks—

hi Patrick, how many stories will 404 ash st have? projected completion date?

That’s an easy one! Four and I don’t know.

The Development Permit came to Council on August 31, 2015, and the details of the building are available starting on page 94 (!) of this 457 page (!) document, although there were slight modifications after to the landscaping because some Councillor whinged about the loss of trees. The building will have 4 stories above ground with a single level of underground parking.

I don’t know how long it will take to build the building, as there are many factors that control that, almost all out of the control of the City. There is heavy equipment on the site right now demolishing the old parking structure (and removing the trees I whinged about), so I suspect that are going to start building soon, but would assume it takes a year or so to build and fit out a building this size?

This does give me an opportunity to point out one of the reasons I wanted to do this Blog, and am so interested in the work we are doing to improve public engagement in the City. So much of how we traditionally share information about important decisions like this is by the way I just pointed out: Council reports buried in weekly .pdf packages counting in the hundreds of pages. Who wants to dig through those to answer a simple question?

In reality, we do many different types of engagement, from kinda-weekly Shaw TV and online-streamed Council meetings (and you all watch those, right? Hi Mom!) to the weekly City Page in the newspaper, and a slightly-dated but still functional website. The City’s “Projects on the Go” page is a little buried, but a great source of info about high-profile projects. We also engage in all kinds of interesting and meaningful consultation (the current OCP update process being a great example of this). But we still have a situation where people can’t easily put their eyes on detailed info they might want.

I don’t propose this Blog will fix that, and I frankly don’t know how to fix it, but the Mayor’s Public Engagement Taskforce is working through various ideas in this direction, and the City is exploring a new Open Data model to make things easier for you to access. So good news ahead, unless no news is good news to you.

Liz D asks—

Hey Pat, the New West Moms Group (#NWMG) loves Pier Park for the playground and sandbox and grassy space by the parking lot, but it is in dire need of some shade. Any chance some umbrellas or something can be added? Thanks!

Yikes! I’ve seen the #NWMG button on a lapel or two, I’ve heard rumours, but not being a Mom (and my Mom not living in #NewWest), this is my first personal encounter with this shadowy cabal…

So here’s the deal: you are probably asking the wrong guy. I can suggest such a thing to Parks staff, and they can let me know how much it would cost to do it, and if it is totally within some discretionary budget and fits the larger Parks plan, then it can probably happen pretty quick. But in that case it is just as likely to happen if you contact Parks folks yourself. It seems like one of those obvious ideas to make the park easier for people to use, and they can add it to their capital plan for improvements/maintenance on the park.

PCR have a great Contact form here that makes it easy for you to drop them suggestions like this: http://www.newwestpcr.ca/about_us/contact_us/contact_form.php

Now, this might raise the question: if I am a Big-shot Councillor, why don’t I just tell them to do this? What use am I? The answer is that I am still working out this entire being-a-politician thing, and I am still trying to figure out where my boundaries are, and where they should be, when asking staff to do things. And that probably takes a longer explanation.

There are obvious times when asking staff to do stuff is totally within bounds. I have asked staff to do administrative tasks related to my role as Councillor – dig out old reports for me, explain to me how a current policy works, reply to official correspondence, coordinate meeting schedules, etc. I have even given (and received) a fair number of opinions about what we should or shouldn’t be doing as a City. This is all obvious and above the board.

There is another level of asking staff to do stuff that is rather out of bounds: I cannot directly ask staff to change City policy or provide a direct service to me or my neighbour, or move their paving schedule or shift how parks operate. Directly asking staff for (as an example) specific roads to be paved is outside of the legislative power of a single Councillor, and is (IMO) a shitty way to wield influence. I just don’t think that is my role as an elected official, and to do so messes up the entire organization structure of how a complicated corporation like a City should work.

The sticky area in between is when someone convinces me (to continue the example) a road needs to be paved. At this point, I think the right path for me to address this is to get the person who wants it paved to write official correspondence to the City making the request (or send in a SeeClickFix). I can follow up and get clarity from the Engineering Department about what the paving schedule is, where that road is on the calendar, and can, in an extreme case, ask staff to go look at a road I am concerned about and make sure their assessment of it is still accurate. They may agree with me, or they may not, but I cannot (and should not) as a single elected official try to unilaterally override their professional opinion. That is bad for the organization.

However, just like I can sometimes be wrong, so can (again, only for this example) Engineering staff. If I feel this is the case, the proper path for me to try to change their mind is to take the idea to my Council colleagues, through Committees and/or Council Meetings. If I can convince the majority of Council to override the existing paving schedule to fix my favoured road first, then at least we have done it publically, any implied conflict is open and transparent, and Council can take the political flak or credit for it.

Now, this example is embarrassingly simplistic, and there are other paths a Councillor can take to make change in the City, but I am still new enough and idealistic enough to think that for me to give orders to staff that includes changing policy or spending money that would otherwise be allocated for other purposes, it needs to go through Council. What a newb.

So much like an earlier Ask Pat request regarding baby change tables at Pier Park, I think it is a good idea, am happy to suggest it to staff, am making no promises, and request that you make the same suggestion directly to Parks!

Thanks Mom.

D-Ro asks—

#1 With summer fast approaching will the elevator, on 4th St, be working by the Spring 2015 deadline.

Thanks

Donovan R.

Ugh. That damn elevator. No it will not be completed by the original deadline (a few months ago), nor will it be completed by the updated deadline (June 1st). However, I have been assured it will be ready by the first week of July, which makes it “summer”, not “spring”. Note, however, that this assurance came from the same people who provided earlier assurances, so I request a little wiggle room.

All I can say about this project is that the problems are not structural, not specific to the site, and not a sign of long-term issues. There were some initial delays due to concrete pouring timing around a cold snap over the winter, then a second delay was (as is my understanding) related to some parts that were ordered and installed that were found to be incompatible with other installed parts, requiring their removal and new orders for replacement parts. This third delay is relatively minor, but the replacement parts require a bit of re-jigging of the framing, mostly for aesthetic reasons.  The time delay is unfortunate, but the extra costs are the responsibility of the contractor, so the issues should not cost the City any extra.

jenarbo asks—

Carnarvon between 8th and 10th is a mess for pedestrians and stressful for drivers. What solutions have been considered, and has anything been decided? Any timeline?

Ugh. It is a mess. I see several problems:

The exit from the Shops at New West Station is wide and friendly, then hits a relatively narrow sidewalk, with a strangely-conceived planter as one tries to get to the crossing at 8th. The other direction takes you past one parking entrance, then the gaping maw of the “breezeway” where drivers, busses and pedestrians all routinely ignore their respective and confusing red lights, until the least-functional three-way stop I have ever seen (one that is completely overwhelmed by the number of pedestrians the crosswalk accommodates) leads to a roundabout the functioning of which seems to confound the common sense of BC drivers which provides bad sightlines to another crosswalk on 10th. The sidewalk is congested with waiting bus passengers and street furniture, made less appealing by the looming (almost overhanging) 60 foot sheer grey sun-blocking wall that rises straight up over the entire 500 feet, while crossing to the sunny side of the street is perilous what with traffic back-ups, confused turns at those aforementioned driveways or three-way stops attempting to get through any opening that may occur in the line of cars and busses only to get to a sidewalk that is more driveway that crosswalk for most of its extent…

From an urban planning perspective, the Plaza 88 complex was a bold and brilliant idea, but from an urban design perspective, the result is close to a disaster. And I really don’t know how to fix it.

I have heard a few radical suggestions: make the road one-way eastbound (although it is generally thought that one-way streets make situations worse if pedestrian safety is your goal, which is why many urban centres are now removing them). Closing the street to traffic between McInnes and the Parkade exit has been suggested (which would only help with a few of the many issues, some locals would complain loudly, and I don’t think our traffic engineers would take it seriously).  Removing street parking would impact a few local businesses, although there is always parking available in the public lots in Plaza88, and would allow a better traffic-calmed street profile with wider sidewalks and better sightlines (but the back-ups would continue).

But no, I have not heard any serious plans, or timelines to implement them.

One thing I don’t want to do right now is make it worse. During recent discussions at Council about the “4th tower” at Plaza 88, this topic was raised numerous times. With another parking entrance on Carnarvon between the roundabout and the three-way stop, with another 6-story podium rising straight up from the sidewalk, with worsened sightlines and more pressure on the street – this is going to be a much harder building to approve until we recognize that Carnarvon is not working well now, and the addition of a stop light at McInnes is not going to solve the problems.

I am open to suggestion.