Mistake Were Made

Sometime back—maybe 2+ years ago—it was announced that there were virtually no new water connections available in Point Roberts, even though the area is not built out at all. A major part of the reason was that the Vancouver Water District was not legally able to increase the water allotment for which Point Roberts had a long term contract. There were still a few connections available but how to give them out and what to do next? (I wrote about this back on February 21st.)

The Water Board met and hired consultants and worked hard to figure out both an allotment plan for the existing connections and a plan for the future. The lottery was held and some people were happy and others weren’t; the rates went up rather dramatically in order to pay for a new, much bigger holding tank that would maximize the use of the water that we did receive from Vancouver. (One problem is that it is a daily water allotment and that we don’t use it all in the cooler months and use more than the daily amount in the summer and the excess has to be stored.)

Now, we are told that there is actually no problem and there is plenty of water available using the current storage tank. Mistake, apparently, were made. Just one, as it were, not the usual 'mistakes were made.' Initially it sounded like some kind of mathematical problem in some kind of engineering report and some other report that was approved but got lost somewhere, misfiled, put in a box, and what with employees coming and going, well, who knows? It’s a complex system, I guess, and nobody has a great grasp on the details . The devil may be in the details, but it very much sounds like a formidable screw-up for which no one involved has any interest whatsoever in being held accountable. Could be an accurate account, though. Mistakes do get made; certainly I make them all the time and I imagine others do, too. We might hope that people would check their math more than once, might even consult someone else about how the math looks to them, but probably that doesn’t always happen. Somebody in the government reports that there was no mistake made; just a report that got overlooked which is, I would think, at least some kind of mistake.

So, it happened. But what I want to know is, regardless of who is responsible for it happening, how come nobody is talking about putting the water rates back to where they were, now that we don’t have to pay to build a new storage tank? Well, last June, and it would appear from the local newspaper coverage that this was after the Water Board had discovered the new, 3 million gallon storage tank was not needed, they began to talk about the need for a million dollar water line replacement for Point Roberts. So I guess those increased rates will go for something. There’s always something that needs to be fixed; the nature of infrastructure, maintenance, and all that. It is at such moments, however, that I would rather not hear about events like Alaska Senator Ted Stevens being indicted for corruption.