Water capacity

[ZEBuilder]

When will we see water recovery be built into our codes in this province? In Cambridge, the local news headlines are all about commercial property owners with gigantic amounts of paved area complaining about the new wastewater recovery charges. It doesn't seem to be taken too seriously from the opinion of this random grump on the street.

You'll have to get it regulated in the OBC before you'll see anything change provincially. In the current environment the MECP has various requirements that have to be met when it comes to runoff however municipalities then have to implement these restrictions as part of site plan approvals.

In Kitchener for example everything needs to meet the SWM policy, watershed studies, and the ISW-MP. How it is implemented is up to the developers, but the only way to get SPA or subdivision approval is if you meet those requirements.

One of the ways to meet the requirements is through infiltration galleries (the giant yellow or black pieces of plastic you see on sites) these tend to be put next to SWM ponds however they are not limited to those locations, for example at Activa's 1198 Fischer Hallman site there's a gallery underneath the SWM pond, then there's two under parking areas, these will eventually be connected to the downspouts to collect all the roof runoff during rainfall events. Similarly at Activa's Harvest Park/Stauffer Woods subdivision there's SWM ponds and infiltration galleries next to them, but there's also infiltration galleries in the boulevards of every street to collect the rain water from all the new developments and a few other galleries scattered around. At The Metz, they'll have an infiltration channel buried underground, it serves the same purpose as a gallery but it's made of clear stone or equivalent and in this case it will run along the center of the road. You'll also see roof retention used to meet requirements for condos and apartments.

One thing to note about the Cambridge charges is they're just on utility bills now, before they were buried in property taxes so people were paying them just in a different spot, and if users were to implement LID measures or on site retention such as infiltration galleries/ponds, they can get rebates on the charge, so if a place like The Cambridge Centre decided to put infiltration galleries in the parking lot, use permeable pavements instead of the current rigid/flexible pavements they'd get reimbursed for some of the fee since some storm water will remain on site and not reach the public system.