The region already has one water system. Nobody governs it. Part Two.

Ron Shulman

A word before we begin.

I had coffee recently with an interesting and very smart woman, and — to be honest — she admonished me. Not for the analysis. For the framing. You keep writing about pipes and plants, she said, and you are not pushing the thing that actually matters: leadership.

My answer was that with this infrastructure, I hope, will come the leadership we need. But she stayed with me, and I have been musing ever since about why we don’t have the leadership we need — in any of the four municipalities.

Let me offer three thoughts for your consideration.

The first is regionalization. We need the equivalent of a GTA for South Georgian Bay. We need to think regionally, plan regionally, and govern regionally. And to those who fear losing their local identity, my response is: nonsense. The things that make your town yours — recreation, arts and culture, community life — can and will remain driven by local needs and local management. Nobody is coming for your main street.

The second remuneration . One regional government would pay its leadership at a level that recognizes the importance of the job — and the sequitur is that we would finally attract people with the capability, the energy, and the vision to run a complex, growing, changing community. Right now, four small towns compete for talent none of them can afford, and the results are on every page that follows.

And the third…collaboration. The four communities would finally share the resources — the people — required to run a complex system, instead of quadruplicating every department behind four town halls.

Consider the arithmetic. These four municipalities already spend on the order of $230 million a year running four complete organizations for a combined population of roughly 100,000.

Administrative overhead alone — four sets of senior management, finance, HR, IT, and clerks doing the same jobs four times — runs into the tens of millions a year in pure duplication.

Now add the cost of fragmented capital decisions, the kind this series documents in detail: a $70-million well drilled beside a working pipeline in Stayner, a $100-million treatment program contemplated in The Blue Mountains for capacity the region already owns.

Averaged across the region, year after year, the waste of doing everything four times over easily reaches $100 million a year. The quality of the work would bear no comparison to what exists today.

So there you have it. It is time for change. What follows is one piece of that change — the water — and six words you will see repeated throughout, because they are the whole answer in miniature:

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

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Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

Last week I showed you Collingwood’s side of this: a sewage plant that is at capacity and cannot be fixed where it stands, a $270-million drinking-water plant the town calls its own but holds only a minority share in, and a council that — when given the opportunity to address the environmental, financial, and infrastructure crises facing its community by participating in a regional water utility — voted, unanimously, to go it alone anyway.

And step back for a moment, because Collingwood is only one corner of the mess. Across this region, four municipalities drink from one connected system while each pretends it runs its own.

• One town froze all building for lack of water while a full pipe ran through its main street.
• Another is fighting its own residents over a well nobody should have to drill.
• A third is a customer of a neighbour’s plant with a fifty-year-old facility of its own quietly aging toward a rebuild it cannot afford.

Every one of these towns is making ‘ rational’ decisions inside its own borders — and together they are producing tripled projects, frozen permits, provincial rescues, and a bay that gets the consequences.

The problem is that nobody planned this, which is precisely the cause of this mess: nobody plans any of it.

I know what the last two weeks have felt like. A depressing read — and that was deliberate. You cannot fix what you refuse to look at, and this region has spent twenty years refusing to look.

But here is where it turns.

There is a solution.

Today we talk about the solution to the water mess. The wastewater mess — Collingwood’s plant with nowhere to go, the region’s aging treatment — gets its own solution, in a future piece. One system at a time.

The solution is not radical and it is not new. It brings a rational, thoughtful, planned approach to water management to a region that has never had one. And here is the part nobody expects: it will save you money.

The alternative to this mayhem is to create a regional water utility — the Simcoe County Municipal Water Corporation, the MWC. There is nothing new in this.

You already live with utilities. Nobody expects their town to own a power plant. You buy electricity from a utility that owns the generation and the wires, and you pay by the kilowatt-hour. Gas works the same way. So does water.

Ontario already has them.

• Union Water Supply System Inc. — owned by Leamington, Kingsville, Essex, and Lakeshore — runs one treatment plant and one trunk system and sells bulk water by volume to its four member municipalities.
• The Frontenac Municipal Services Corporation builds and operates communal water and wastewater across four rural townships on a full-cost-recovery model.
• Edmonton has delivered its own municipal water for over a century — today through EPCOR, a city-owned utility.
• And right now, Peel — Mississauga, Brampton, and Caledon — is moving its water and wastewater into a single publicly owned corporation.

This is not an experiment. It is how the rest of the world handles exactly the problem this region has and I intend to show you how this solution works, providing higher quality and more environmentally friendly decisions while saving us vast amounts of money.

The place to start is with two pipes most people have never heard of.

The Pipes that Bind

Look at the two maps below. We already have the infrastructure that connects this region’s water. Most people have never heard of either.

The first runs south. Built in 2000, it is a 600-millimetre trunk main carrying treated water from the Raymond A. Barker plant in Collingwood, some 57 kilometres to Alliston — built to supply Honda, laid along the old rail corridor.

The Collingwood–Alliston trunk main (route approximate), laid in the former rail corridor.

The line passes through Batteaux, through the middle of Stayner, and past New Lowell, where connection tees were installed in 2000 for each community’s future needs.

Connection tees were installed for all three in 2000

New Lowell’s is the only one ever opened.

Stayner’s and Batteaux’s have sat unused for twenty-five years.

It was built to carry 13,440 cubic metres a day and designed to expand to 60,000 with added pumping.

Today it moves roughly 9,500.

The west leg (route approximate): Collingwood to The Blue Mountains along the Mountain Road corridor, through the Mountain Road Booster Station. The flow is reversible.

Currently 1,250 cubic metres a day, rising to 4,000 under the plant expansion.

Step back and look at what already exists.

• One regional plant.
• A trunk main running south through three communities with taps built and waiting.
• A west leg to a second municipality that can push water in either direction.
• Four municipalities already drink from one system — Collingwood, New Tecumseth, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview at New Lowell.

The backbone of a regional water utility is not a proposal. It is in the ground, and it has been for twenty-five years. The pipes already bind the region together.

What the region has never had is the governance to use them.

Where the Water Doesn’t Run

A look at the Status Quo

Clearview Township

Clearview Township is the poster child for why water and wastewater cannot be run town by town. For the purposes of this article we are only going to deal with the freshwater issue. It is both large enough to consume our analytic capabilities for now and surprisingly very solvable.

Clearview is in a state of what is called suboptimization: every component, every town or community is driving to optimize its needs at the expense of the total community. Sum the parts and it is easy to see the whole township is disturbingly dysfunctional.

Stayner

Stayner is Clearview’s largest community. Since inception it drew its water from its own municipal wells. For years, the known local groundwater was considered insufficient.

The following describes a situation that is almost impossible to believe.

The Collingwood–New Tecumseth pipeline was built in 2000 and runs through the centre of Stayner. When it was built connection tees were installed at Batteaux, Stayner, and New Lowell in anticipation of future water needs in the Township.

In 2008 the town commissioned a long-term water supply study. The study found no viable new groundwater sources and then it priced that solution at $50.7 million.

Just so that you don’t miss this point, the line runs through Stayner, there is a tee to hook up, all that is required is a pipe. $50.7 million.

Nothing was done. No negotiation, no second opinion, no challenge to the number — the report went on a shelf, the tee stayed closed, and fifteen years passed.

On March 10, 2023, those wells reached available capacity. The Township froze building permits. Approximately 3,150 approved housing units could not proceed.

The study was eventually taken off the shelf and dusted off — and the connection, at that price, was judged unaffordable.

So what was the decision? Stayner chose to build a well.

In 2021, the Township committed to building its own supply — and to everything that came with it:

● four new municipal wells at Klondike Park Road, northeast of town, drawing on a deep aquifer discovered during a provincial seismic survey;

• treatment, storage and pumping facility to serve them;
• roughly eight kilometres of watermain to carry the water into Stayner’s system —
• the whole of it sized for a town projected to grow from 5,000 people to 28,000 by 2034.

A project was initially estimated at $25 to $28 million in 2022, $42 million by 2023, and $70 million by 2024 — with substantial completion not expected until 2027.

How was it paid for?

• Half by the Province — a $35-million grant from the Housing-Enabling Water Systems Fund.
• Half by three developers, roughly $10 million each in prepaid development charges,
• The Township’s own share under $5 million
• A $30-million County contingency credit line standing by to bridge any cash-flow gaps.

Not to be excessively redundant, but $70 million spent, when there was a pipe and a spigot right there. How is that possible?

The next part of this should really aggravate you. (which is what I am trying to do, because this is what happens when small towns are given the leash to spend someone else’s money).

The $50.7M was three things, almost none of it pipe:

1. Debt buy-in — purchasing a share of the pipeline’s outstanding construction debt.
2. The water — the capitalized cost of buying it, at a rate the study itself called relatively high.
3. Storage — large reservoirs Stayner would need because the pipeline couldn’t be trusted to keep flowing. It had shut down for maintenance for as long as 32 days at a stretch, and between 2009 and 2018 there were 89 days when Stayner could not have drawn from it. From their perspective, relying on that supply would need enough stored water to ride out a month-long outage — reservoirs sized for weeks of autonomy. But that case rested entirely on the pipeline’s old record. Those chronic maintenance shutdowns were subsequently engineered out — relining, new valves and fittings along the corridor — and since 2021 the trunk main has run without a comparable outage. By the time Stayner committed to its well, between 2021 and 2024, the unreliability that had justified weeks of stored water was already gone. The storage case had quietly evaporated.

We did our research (double-checked) the data and this is what we found…

• The entire 57-kilometre trunk main from Collingwood to Alliston was constructed in 1999–2000 for $28.3 million. Five partners funded it: a $5-million provincial grant,
  • $7 million from New Tecumseth,
  • $1.3 million from Collingwood’s utility,
  • $11.1-million loan from the Ontario Clean Water Agency,
  • the balance from the builder.

Now let’s look at how ridiculous the decision process was…

• New Tecumseth had been buying water off the pipe since the day it opened: metered, by the cubic metre, pay for what you use.
• The Town of the Blue Mountains was buying Collingwood’s water the same way, through the connection at Mountain Road.
• New Lowell — a community in Stayner’s own township — was drawing treated water from the very same main under the very same principle.

The precedent was set — three times over. The model existed. It was flowing through Clearview’s own borders.

What happened instead was an absurd waste of money.

• The Province threw in $35 million with no mechanism of control — a pattern we have seen over and over.
• The town committed more than $30 million of its development charges, collected in advance from three developers and spent on a well beside a full pipe.
  • Money that is not free: every dollar of it is now unavailable for the town’s water infrastructure — not just what 3,150 new homes will need, but the old, slowly failing systems already due for replacement.

I am going to repeat this over and over, we need to…

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

Nottawa

Nottawa is one of the loveliest corners of this region — a quaint crossroads village on County Road 124, minutes south of Collingwood, with the Pretty River valley at its back and the escarpment on the horizon. A general store, a school, a few hundred homes under mature trees. It is the kind of place people move to precisely because it isn’t anywhere else — and the kind of place growth was always going to find.

Nottawa is a community that has happily lived off well water and septic systems since it was settled. Every home in the village gets its water from a well — the private wells of the older properties, and the small municipal well system, the McKean, that serves the newer subdivision. For generations, that was enough.

The last few years have proved a problem. Residents report that water levels have been declining — not because of any single event, but under the steady pressure of development on the aquifer everyone draws from.

A village that never had to think about its water has started to.

There was supposed to be an answer. The plan of record — the servicing framework the township had carried for roughly fifteen years — was to connect Nottawa to municipal water: Collingwood’s supply, extended to the village. That was the promise local developers and landowners planned against, and the security residents assumed was coming.

Then, in April 2024, council reversed it.

And understand what that reversal did to the price of a connection. Everywhere municipal water works, the municipality builds the trunk — the main that brings water reasonably close to a community — and recovers that cost across the whole system over time. The homeowner pays for the last leg, from the main to the house: typically twelve to fifteen thousand dollars. That is the norm.

When Clearview walked away from the trunk, they told the homeowners that the entire cost of reaching Nottawa fell onto their individual homes — and the price of connecting jumped up to $159,000 a house.

Now I am going to editorialize for a moment, if you will bear with me.

These are people who have paid their taxes all their lives. Some have lived in this community for generations. Clean water in this country is not a privilege — it is the first obligation a government owes the people it serves. This is not a third world country.

And yet a village of taxpaying families was told, after fifteen years of promises, that the water main would not come. Figure it out yourselves. Good luck.

A council that treats its own residents this way has failed the most basic test of the job — and the remedy for that arrives every four years, in October.

So why would a council walk away from a fifteen-year promise to its own people? I won’t pretend to know what was in anyone’s mind. I’ll show you what was on the township’s balance sheet, and let you draw your own conclusion.

A new subdivision of 500 homes is coming to Nottawa — a village-sized addition to a village of only a few hundred. Homes on that scale need water and sewers, and it was the question of how to service them that put Nottawa on the council table in the first place. Now weigh what those 500 homes are worth to the Township.

Five hundred homes is serious money for the township. Nottawa sits outside the three urban service areas, so each home pays the township-wide development charge — currently $12,724 for a single detached house, rising to $17,138 under the Township’s new 2024 DC study — before the County and the school boards take their own charges on top.

Across 500 units, that is somewhere between $6 and $9 million in township development charges alone, plus permit fees, plus a permanent addition to the property tax base.

The Township’s own DC study counts on it: its growth forecast books 500 units for Nottawa, six per cent of all the housing growth in Clearview to buildout. This development is not an application sitting on a counter. It is a line item in the township’s financial future.

A township standing to book millions from this development chose the one servicing path that kept the developer building — and set the cost down on the village’s own aquifer. Make of that what you will.

So when the water connection died, nobody blinked. No water? No problem. We’ll just drill our own well. The developer proposed expanding the McKean system — two new municipal wells, a new treatment plant, a new reservoir, built into the development itself. The township’s engineers tested it and called it feasible. Staff recommended it. The revenue stayed on the rails — with the village’s aquifer as the collateral.

And let me be clear about something before going further: this is not NIMBY, none of this is a criticism of the developer. I live in a Georgian Communities development myself, in Windfall. It is beautiful. The homes are well designed and well built. The developer in Nottawa is doing exactly what the process demands of it — solving, at its own cost, a servicing problem the municipality created.

No, this is about two things. First, a process run by small-town, short-sighted politicians and their henchmen in the bureaucracy “…greedily clasping their hands like Oliver at the table — please, sir, one more cup — except Oliver was starving, and these people are simply hungry for the fees.”

Now let’s talk about how half this problem can be solved — with huge savings to the developer, and the residents getting the water they need. The other half, unfortunately — not so much.

Have a look at the map.

The tee at Batteaux has been sitting on the regional pipeline since 2000, less than three kilometres from Nottawa, up a road that already exists.

If a connection was made at the Batteaux junction, what would it actually cost?

Watermain construction on an existing rural road allowance runs, at standard Ontario rates, roughly $1,000 to $1,500 per metre installed. Add engineering, contingency, a valve chamber at the tee and pressure works at the village end, and the trunk is a project of roughly $4 million, pending detailed design. Be generous — build out the village distribution, connect everything, gold-plate it — and call it $20 million, serving the existing village and the 500 new homes together.

Under a regional utility, that is exactly the kind of build the utility exists to finance — and everything changes.

The developer does not build a well field, a treatment plant, and a reservoir, and does not bury their cost in the price of 500 homes. The 500 homes connect.

The existing residents connect too, if they choose, at the normative cost of a connection — twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, not $159,000 — because the trunk is the utility’s to build, not each household’s to carry.

The aquifer stays where it is, untouched, under the village. And the fight between neighbours, builder, and township — the one manufactured entirely by a servicing decision — has nothing left to feed on.

One more time, so nobody can twist it: this is not about stopping development. Nottawa’s homes should be built. The region needs the housing.

But the sewage connection to Birch Street in Collingwood will not go ahead, and as a result the development will not go ahead until a regional sewage plant and infrastructure is built.

Collingwood staff project nearly 4,000 cubic metres a day of spare capacity. This is a paper reserve.

Experts have already determined the plant has passed its 80-per-cent trigger, a plant that has already failed into the bay. You don’t add capacity to this kind of plant. That is simply irresponsible, but not unexpected from this bunch.

What the region needs is a regional utility that will make a regional plan — rational, timely, and responsible for the whole. That is the priority, and it is where this series goes next.

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

Leg 2 of the Pipeline System — The Blue Mountains

Currently, the town draws its water primarily from the Thornbury Water Treatment Plant. The plant was built in 1977, takes water from an intake half a kilometre out in Georgian Bay. With the vast growth of the community, the town is running out of water.

In March 2024, the town’s East Side Water Storage and Supply study came before the public. Its job was to solve the water supply deficiencies in the town’s eastern pressure zones — Craigleith, the mountain, where the growth is — and it evaluated several alternatives.

This is the council endorsement…

‘to build a new water treatment plant in Craigleith (7,133 m³/day) with a new intake near Northwinds Beach; upgrade the Thornbury plant to 18,165 m³/day; new 5,000 m³ at-grade reservoir in Craigleith; new 285 L/s booster pumping station (decommissioning Arrowhead Road); twinned watermains from the new plant to Happy Valley Reservoir and on to pressure zone 4.’

The estimate for this plan was $66 million. This is an interesting number. When Collingwood started its plan for a new treatment plant it also started at about $60 million and you know where that went. Without question this would cost the town more than $100 million.

It is worth noting that in A Fiscal Autopsy, I documented the town’s projected water and wastewater debt to 2028 at approximately $57 million — with no legitimate way to pay it down.

So what’s another $100 million?

No problem — the Province will give us the money.

“Hello Brian, are you there?”

That would be Brian Saunderson: our MPP, former Collingwood mayor, and now Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing — the man sitting inside the very ministry every one of these funding requests lands on.

Now let’s look at a rational alternative: the west leg of the regional pipeline.

The connection already exists. The Mountain Road Booster Station sits at the municipal boundary, delivering water from the regional plant into The Blue Mountains.

How much does the water cost… Interesting question. Three customers buy water from the regional plant today: New Tecumseth, The Blue Mountains, and Clearview at New Lowell.

Each customer buys on its own separately negotiated terms — there is no single price for the same water from the same plant. New Tecumseth’s rate lives in one agreement, The Blue Mountains’ in another, New Lowell’s in a third.

Nobody can tell you whether they pay the same, because there is nothing to compare against: no tariff, no system rate, no published price. Under fragmentation, the price of water is not a rate. It is a negotiation — and the leverage always sits with the seller.

Then remember the part everyone forgets: Once the new plant comes on line, Collingwood paid roughly $44 million of a $270-million expansion — about 16 per cent. The Province paid $150 million. New Tecumseth paid the rest.

Collingwood holds a minority share in a regional asset — and yet it sits on one side of every table, negotiating the price of the region’s water as if it owns the plant with every town that needs it. Does this seem crazy?

The alternative is sitting right in the TBM council’s face and it will happen, because the Province is no longer going to throw money at each town.

So let’s start with the obvious question. Will the new regional plant have the capacity to supply The Blue Mountains. ?

To answer….This is a regional plant. It is being expanded to 59,000 cubic metres a day precisely to serve the region.

Today the region’s four municipalities hold roughly 100,000 people; at standard Ontario planning rates of about 400 litres per person per day, that is a total demand in the range of 40,000 cubic metres a day — comfortably inside the expanded plant’s 59,000.

By 2050, a regional population approaching 150,000 would need roughly 60,000 — which is exactly why the plant, like the pipeline before it, was designed to expand.

So what are the implications for The Blue Mountains?

Simple: everything the town is about to build, the region has already built.

The regional plant has the capacity to serve TBM’s entire future. The pipe to deliver it exists: the west leg at Mountain Road, flowing today.

What TBM’s $100-million program buys is capacity the region already owns, delivered through infrastructure the town would have to duplicate.

Under a utility, TBM builds none of it. It upsizes one connection and fixes its local pinch points — real work, a fraction of the cost, and the regional infrastructure will be carried by the utility.

The town will buy its water at the same rate as every other participating member in the community, the price will be set by a tariff instead of a negotiation.

The Thornbury plant retires at the end of its life instead of being rebuilt. The Craigleith plant will never be built. The $100 million will never get spent.

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

To Summarize

One plant. Two pipes. Four municipalities. That is the region’s water system — in the ground, working, for twenty-five years. What it has never had is an organization that is responsible for the whole. That is about to change.

Fragmentation of decision making has been expensive.

• Stayner spent $70 million drilling a well beside a pipeline that runs through the middle of town, with a connection built for it in 2000 that has never been opened. And now it is not in a position to participate in a structure that will probably lower the cost of water.
• Nottawa is being pushed onto its own aquifer, its residents at war with their own township, while a tee sits three kilometres away and its sewage is pointed at a plant that has already failed into the bay.
  • A regional utility, moving quickly, could have the Batteaux spur to Nottawa in the ground by the fall of 2027.
• The Blue Mountains, carrying $57 million in water debt it cannot pay down, has just endorsed a two-plant construction program estimated at $66 million — a number that, on this region’s record, is only the opening bid — rather than buy water from a regional plant with six times its entire future demand.
• The Province must historically shoulder some of the blame. It has paid for all of it: $35 million here, $150 million there, rescue after rescue, with no mechanism of control and no reason to believe the next rescue won’t be needed.
  • This is going to end. The Province needs to formally send a letter to each Mayor letting them know that there will be no more local funding for water and wastewater treatment infrastructure.
• The people making the extremely expensive and long term decisions were not up to the capabilities required.

In fact, let’s be brutal. The history, the decision making, the lack of vision, the pretense of control are in my view without precedent as far as a lack of competence and fiscal accountability.

The Simcoe County Municipal Water Corporation ends it.

One utility that owns the plant and the pipes. The MWC will…

• acquire the new plant by paying Collingwood and New Tecumseth out at their invested cost,
• take over a pipeline that has long since been paid down and depreciated.
• plan the region’s water as the single system,
• sell the water on a bulk basis to every town at one wholesale rate,
• finance growth the way every utility on earth does — over the life of the assets, out of the water bill you already pay.
• Your town keeps your bill, your rates, your local pipes. The competence moves to where the decisions are.

The water is already regional. The pipes already bind. The only thing missing is the decision to implement.

Think Regionally. Manage Locally. Govern Professionally.

Part One made the case that Collingwood cannot fix its water and wastewater alone. This piece has made the case that nobody in this region can — and that the solution has been sitting in the ground, waiting, for twenty-five years.

Next: the wastewater. The plant that cannot be fixed where it stands, and the regional plan that fixes it somewhere else. That is a bigger story, and it gets its own piece.

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