Work ongoing to connect Okanagan Landing properties to city sewer service

Jan 9, 2024 | 1:30 PM

The process of getting properties in Vernon’s Okanagan Landing neighbourhood off septic is ongoing, with several more years of work still needed.

In 2020, Vernon city council endorsed a sewer extension into the Landing area to provide the city service to priority areas and make it available to residences in the neighbourhood.

The initial phase of horizontal directional drilling to connect properties to the system began in June of 2020, and since then, 310 properties had been provided a collector pipe at a total cost of approximately $3.8-million.

An update on the connections, presented to council by city staff on Monday, Jan. 8, stated work was ongoing to provide the service to properties in the Okanagan Landing area, though it still required a lot more time before all the sites were hooked up.

“Under the current plan, assuming continued funding from council of around $1.2-million per year, it will be probably three or four more years before we get to the end of this initial phase,” Greg Thompson, senior project manager for the City of Vernon, told council.

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“Then we move into more of the traditional open-cut areas — Willow Park and Dallas (Road) areas are good examples of that — and it’s just a different type of construction, more expensive, and that will be in the five-year range that we’ll be into those areas.”

Infrastructure Manager Mark Dowhaniuk told council there were an estimated 260 properties in Okanagan Landing that still needed to have their collector pipes provided, including roughly 150 east of Okanagan Lake and 110 along the water.

“The ones along the lake will likely be serviced through continued re-development,” Dowhaniuk said.

“East of the lake, there’s those challenging kind of flatter properties where we may not be able to drill, but we’ll get to them.”

Though hundreds of properties have so far been provided the pipes, the city’s current bylaw does not have the authority to levy the sewer fees on those properties, and only a select few have been connected due to septic system failures.

“Once the bylaw is adopted in the first quarter of this year (2024), then we would send a notice out to all owners advising them they could connect and then we expect to see more connections,” Thompson explained. He added there was no firm timeline for when the city could start collecting fees to make up for the construction costs.

“The nature of the bylaw is that it would be voluntary connection, so when owners wish to connect, they would connect. Based on the past services we’ve installed, we’re seeing around five per cent per year are connecting, so it will take some time.”

Thompson added he expects to see many of the older septic systems in the Landing failing in the near future, resulting in an uptick in connections to the sewer system.

Council received the report for information.

Council also requested staff report back with the number of Okanagan Landing properties that have hooked up to the sewer system, with a breakdown outlining the specific areas in which the connected properties are located.

by Liam Verster

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