Actions of city officials repeatedly fail the smell test
Fines should be paid by those responsible, not the taxpayers

Aftereffects of the infamous "Munster Sewergate Fiasco" have surfaced, in the news, yet again.

As if driven by lunacy, the Chiarelli-Stavinga-CRA scheme was to send the sewage in a route that would leave Munster in the opposite direction from its Kanata destination, travel south to the Franktown Road, then –-below the water table— course through the Richmond Fen, then, (without disclosing this vital fact to other councillors), have it flow under pressure through the drinking water source for Richmond’s 1,100 private shallow wells, then cross the Jock River bottom (southerly) to the Richmond pumping station. From there it would finally head north to a Kanata pumping station.
(See: Sanity check)
(See: Rationale for Chiarelli's pipeline agenda remains unexplained - or does it?)
(See: Janet Stavinga: The Dr. Kavorkian of source water protection?)

The Region/City and CRA were cautioned many times by independent engineers and residents that their unsound plan would pose a perilous, and completely uncalled for, ongoing threat of contamination to families reliant upon shallow private wells for their drinking water. Also, they were warned that the long sewage transit times between Munster and Richmond would most certainly cause persistent odours at the pump station. It fell on deaf ears.

*Whatever was the real agenda of Bob Chiarelli, Janet Stavings and CRA, residents acutely believe --to this day-- that serving the public interest and protecting public health were not on their list of objectives.

In fact, the many residents who voiced their palpable concerns were defamed, ridiculed, demeaned, derided, lied to by city officials and threatened by attack dogs, (see photo and correspondence), throughout various phases of planning and construction. One resident was even maliciously sued by CRA, (See: Landowner's Magazine-Feb-08), for the amount of $4.2M in a classic "SLAPP" suit, (See:details of suit), to silence him, (See: Public Interest Advocacy Centre Executive Summary on SLAPP action suits), while he tried to bring clarity to the human and environmental risks that were long-foretold by independent professional engineers -- and are now starting to manifest themselves.

The end result was that even though one of the top environmental lawyers in Ontario determined that the Environmental Assessment process was "improperly", and in fact, "illegally" conducted, (Rod Northey Meeting with Richmond residents), the cries for help from Richmond residents were ignored at City Hall, (Petition to Mayor and Council), as well as at the Ministry of the Environment, (MOE), and all the way up to Premier McGuinty’s office. Part of the Village struggle is documented here: http://www.ottawasewergatefiasco.com/r.htm. 

Construction of the hazardous misbegotten forcemain went ahead regardless, leaving the vulnerable residents feeling, among other things, that there have been numerous breaches of the public trust combined with reckless and unwarrantable public endangerment that must still be addressed in the courts or through a judicial inquiry. Better to have the inquiry before there are fatalities, rather than as the result of fatalities.

Now that the Abatement and Enforcement Branch of the MOE is proving numerous findings of the long-predicted illegal odour offences, the Ministry has an obligation to conduct increased due diligence on the file in order to expose the underlying gross negligence that led to the creation of such an irresponsible 'ticking time bomb' threat of slow leakage of sewage into Richmond's private wells.

The MOE must realize that the odour revelations are the 'canary in the coal mine' indicator of a much greater threat that has to be reversed, before deaths occur.

The MOE’s recent additional charges against the city clearly demonstrate proof that city officials were wrong and that resident fears, complaints and the many engineering expert predictions were justified all along.