Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Tonight I am rolling out the red carpet to make sewage sexy and effluent exotic, because we need to talk about the planned upgrade of the Wannon Water treatment plant.

This upgrade will service Warrnambool for the next 20 years.

I want to explain, as best I can, why before 1 July (when the chance for public comment closes) we need to ask for better from Wannon Water, to aim higher, and to stop using our beautiful ocean like a giant Maytag washing machine.

As it stands, Wannon Water plans to spend $40 million expanding the treatment works at the end of Elliot St, so it can double its capacity to eventually handle around 30 million litres of sewage a day by 2040.

This Wannon Water production should be a blockbuster starring the Brad Pitt of shit and the Betty Boop of poop and the Scarlett Johansson of industrial trade waste, except it isn’t even close.

It’s more of a B-grade movie starring faded stars of yesteryear.

That’s because the $40 million plan is the cheapest option and will not change the way our sewage is treated in the future from how it is treated now.

This means, in 2040, we will still be pouring millions of gallons of treated sewage/effluent into the ocean off Thunder Point using exactly the same treatment system as in 2020.

And that system, according to wise minds like the Clean Ocean Foundation (COF), is already behind the times by about 20 years.

The COF is lobbying to have all waste water discharged to the ocean at a Class A+ standard by 2030 to reduce ocean pollution.

Warrnambool is not even at Class A now, and won’t be at Class A after the upgrade, let alone at A+.

Worse, our system often doesn’t work, as can been seen by what is called the “mixed liquor” (which sounds sexy, but is the revolting foamy brown stuff) which still turns up off Thunder Point.

What we should be aiming for by 2040 is clean, treated effluent that can be recycled and reused and doesn’t have to go into the ocean at all, but if it does, at least make sure it is not full of pollutants like phosphorous.

Right, how do I make phosphorous sexy?

Well, here is a photo of a very sexy Brad Pitt, followed by a sexy Wannon Water graph that shows that Warrnambool Cheese and Butter – the burgundy colour – producing a Pitt-load of phosphorous, nitrogen and ammonia that goes into our ocean:

Warrnambool Cheese and Butter is owned by the Canadian giant, Saputo, which turns over about $11 billion a year.

Perhaps we could ask Saputo to throw a few million toward helping us make it to the Hollywood A-list by making sure our ocean had the cleanest effluent possible?

Or maybe Saputo could spend a few million dollars improving the treatment of its own waste before it makes anywhere near Wannon Water and into the ocean?

Another of the problems from this dairy trade waste is it’s extremely salty, which means the effluent water cannot be reused easily without burning everything along the way.

I found it astonishing that of the millions of litres of waste water produced by the Warrnambool treatment plant – 15 million litres a day – only 60 million litres a year is reused, and only at the plant itself.

In the scheme of things, 60m litres a year is an eye dropper full and the rest goes into the sea to swirl around in nature’s Maytag: not a drop is recycled or reused outside of the Elliot St treatment plant.

Wannon Water says it has investigated reuse projects and also tried to find customers for recycled water, but without success, no doubt because of the high salt content among other things.

So we have a treatment plant within walking distance of the Warrnambool Golf Course* and the new Younger St housing estate, yet no recycled waste water from the treatment plant is being used at either. (*Clarification: water was diverted from Fonterra, before it reached the plant, for use on the golf course. Please see comment from Dave at the end of this story).

Good grief.

If this is “green” Warrnambool under the Warrnambool City Council 2040 plan, then we have a long, long way to go.

Of course it all comes down to dollars and who pays.

People, naturally, become nervous when Wannon Water talks about higher customer bills to cover the cost, but here is a photo of a beautiful Scarlett Johansson, under which we can see a beautiful graph showing the costs.

You will see that between the various options, it is really not that different – a range of 1.16% to 1.53%.

Is Wannon Water really that strapped for cash or ways to find it?

How bizarre that Lyndoch Living – a not-for-profit, community owned aged care home – can roll out out a $100 million masterplan, yet Wannon Water can only come up with $40 million for a major treatment plant expansion to service our city for the next 20 years.

Water treatment is complex, but I know we can do better than this, our kids deserve to inherit something better than this, and the Clean Ocean Foundation is right behind Warrnambool in its quest to ask for more.

The COF will appear in the blockbuster sequel to this story tomorrow night, offering us non-science-minded folk some starting tips for our submissions.

In the meantime, you can find out more about Wannon Water’s plans via its website here.

Good night, credits roll, lights dim.

I am tip toeing back into the Tip Jar. If you would like to see The Terrier keep digging, please throw what is affordable into the tip jar below. 

The Tip Jar

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

You would think after a whopping 16 years as a Warrnambool City councillor that Cr Michael Neoh would know local rules and regulations inside and out, but it seems he has had something of a brain fade around his own family business.

That business is the Penang Alley restaurant at the back of Cr Neoh’s property on lower Liebig St, which opened on Boxing Day and has since operated without a mandatory grease trap, and an illegal back deck that fails to meet building standards.

Whoops!

How did that happen?

Well, part of it seems to be that Penang Alley mysteriously morphed from a ‘pop up’ to ‘permanent’.

When the fake grass and house brick pillars were being installed for the ‘pop up’ last November, I was contacted by competitors who were mightily miffed that a city councillor would set up a temporary cafe to catch the summer trade, when they had slogged it out all winter.

Would Cr Neoh need to install an expensive Wannon Water compliant grease trap like the rest of them, they asked?

And did all of the furnishings meet safety standards?

And how about the wooden deck tacked on to the back? Was it legal?

So many questions and, at the time, so few answers, in fact Cr Neoh – at that time – was also mightily miffed…at being asked to explain:

“The business will meet all the necessary requirements for the classified business,” was his only comment to me, via email.

That was in November.

Penang Alley is still there and, as it turns out, it has not met “all the necessary requirements”.

Finding this out has not been easy and has taken months of questions to the council by myself and the Warrnambool Ratepayers’ Association who, I discovered earlier this year, was also on the case.

The WRA finally got some answers, where I got none.

After two months of waiting, I was pretty much told by the council to contact the WRA and ask them for the responses.

(Around and around we go…)

The upshot to all of this pesky persistence, however, is that it was finally confirmed that a 600mm grease trap to catch all the crap was compulsory  – there wasn’t one – and the timber back deck – used by the public all summer – didn’t meet building standards.

In a word, it was illegal.

(Furnishings, surprisingly, don’t have to meet any health guidelines, other than being clean.)

The council told the WRA that these issues are being fixed.

But how did Cr Neoh, who has been on council since George W Bush was President of the United States, not know he was cutting corners?

And more the point, how did he get away with it?

Penang Alley is within a shoe toss of the council headquarters and fellow councillors (and most likely council staff) have hung out there.

I wouldn’t get away with it – I get WCC notices in the mail saying that I have 10 days to trim my garden bushes that have crept over the fence or the council will come and do it for me at my expense! Take that, daisy bush!

And you, most likely, wouldn’t get away with it either.

And this, let’s be honest, is what grates the most: the double standards, the two sets of rules, the sense that who you are determines what action is taken, or how fast it happens.

Nobody has an issue with a councillor opening a funky little eatery – go for it – but no wonder it has upset those who were forced to spend time and money doing the right thing from day one.

Yep, that’s enough to give anyone a bad case of entitlement indigestion.

I offered Cr Neoh another right of reply before running this piece. He has not taken it up.

I am tip toeing back into the Tip Jar. If you would like to see The Terrier keep digging, please throw what is affordable into the tip jar below. 

The Tip Jar

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Will one of Warrnambool’s oldest original bridges survive the wrecking ball? Oh, I hope so.

The Warrnambool City Council will soon decide what to do about the failing Stanley St bridge/Edward’s Bridge that crosses the Merri River near the pastel monstrosity formerly known as the Lady Bay Hotel, and which has been in service for 130 years.

Demolition is an option, such is the Warrnambool way.

Just three years ago –  in 2017 – the council spent tens of thousands of dollars fixing this very bridge and strengthening the piles that hold it up.

Apart from the piles, the bridge was in “generally good condition” the WCC’s then-infrastructure manager said in a media release.

Even better, the end result of spending these tens of thousands of dollars on repairs was that “the historic bridge will be serviceable for decades to come”.

Decades? Not quite.

Here we are, just three years later, and Stanley St bridge is not only in need of major repairs – another $80,000 will be spent straight away – but is under threat of demolition.

How can this be?

And has the council demanded a refund for the works that failed to extend the life of the bridge for five years, let alone decades to come?

I asked the council spokesman these questions on 20 May and also for a figure on how much the 2017 bridge works cost: there has been no response.

Oddly, these 2017 works didn’t rate a mention in the report to the council meeting on 4 May when councillors talked about how much money they would need to borrow to either knock the old bridge down, repair it, or keep it and build a brand new bridge alongside.

Nobody put up their hand and said, hang on, didn’t we just spend a bucketload of public money a couple of years ago to fix this bridge?

Like the Merri River in flood, so much public money just swishes through and is never seen or heard of again.

The same could be said for the Hopkins River bridge which is also in need of major repairs, despite being completely replaced just 20 years ago.

It will soon have $460,000 spent on it to prevent “catastrophic failure” caused by defective concrete and other work that, obviously, couldn’t handle the harsh conditions.

Here’s part of the shopping list for Pontings, according to the tender:

Concrete patch repairs to pre-stressed beams;

Concrete patch repairs to pier headstocks and pier piles;

Crack injection to pier piles;

Silane treatment to pre-stressed beams;

Silane treatment to pier headstocks;

Silane treatment to pier headstocks; and

Protective paint system for pedestrian walkway galvanised beams & plates/cleats.

Cripes, that is some list.

The Stanley St bridge will cost around $2.6m to replace, or $1.2m to repair, with the council to cover half the cost and the remainder from a grant.

Perhaps if we had got it right the first time, we wouldn’t be facing the loss of another piece of our precious history.

My hope is the new bridge, if it must be built, runs alongside the old….and we push for a decent warranty.

Any other option should not be an option at all.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Reality bites: the Warrnambool City Council has written to families with kids in kindergarten to say the fees are going up for the next two terms.

Take that, families with young children, a nice big slice of cold fish across the chops! C19 be damned!

Letters were sent out to families last week saying the new fee would be $340 per term, up $8, “as reflected” in the 2020-21 budget.

That’s odd, because the WCC Budget for 2020-21 hasn’t been passed.

In fact a special council meeting will be held next Monday (June 15) so people who have taken the time and effort to write a submission can be heard.

Too bad if you planned to object to higher kinder fees – it’s a done deal!

And what a deal.

For the sake of raising, what, an extra $10,000 or $20,000 toward the bottom line of a $73 million budget, they are kicking young families right in the crayons.

If the WCC can’t absorb that sort of cost as a goodwill gesture to young families as they emerge from C19, then its priorities really are broken.

Perhaps the CEO could defer his automatic pay rise and any bonuses for 2020 indefinitely – I reckon that would cover the cost of the fingerpaints.

Or maybe we could cancel the delayed trip to Sweden to look at hydrogen fuel cell prototypes, which seems a little excessive when we are apparently struggling to fund morning fruit and milk.

For those who listened to the outpouring of self-congratulatory twaddle from the Mayor and councillors during last week’s meeting about the WCC’s “wonderful” response to Covid-19, this fee rise is a slap back to earth.

Fee rises hurt. Rate rises hurt.

And they hurt some families even in the “good” times, let alone when the ass has just fallen out of the national economy.

This kinder fee rise may also not be the last, but the first, for 2020-21, because hidden in the DRAFT budget is a line showing the fees for Term 1 and 2 next year.

It has three little letters: TBC.

To be confirmed.

We will watch with interest to see if any of the seven councillors stand up on 6 July, when the budget is due to be passed, and put a line right through any kindergarten fee increases for the next 12 months.

That – not self congratulation – is the kind of practical help our community needs right now.

Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Dirty dumps: isn’t it incredible to think that in 2020 we still have waves of brown, creamy, sewage water turning up at Thunder Point from the Wannon Water treatment plant?

The video above, captured by Good Will Nurdle Hunting, was taken from above the outfall pipe off Shelly Beach last Saturday, May 30.

Another gorgeous brown tide was also crashing onto the rocks on Tuesday 26 May.

It also happened on 17 March, which means there have been at least three such “dirty dumps” into the ocean in the past three months.

The reason is that the Wannon Water plant is full to the gills.

It can’t take much more of our gunk – most of which comes from three main industries – and the system is failing more than it should.

The good news – if you could call it that – is that, according to Wannon Water GM Service Delivery Ian Bail, these brown waves haven’t included raw sewage. (ie. We won’t see a cameo appearance of our personal contributions.)

The other good news is that we have a chance to put things right.

The EPA is asking for public feedback on a $40 million upgrade of the treatment plant that will double its capacity – 30 million litres of waste water a day.

Hooray, I thought, we will soon have the best treatment plant possible.

Wrong.

The $40m upgrade will see more of the same technology that is used now.

For the next 20 years we will continue to have a “secondary” treatment system, and not a “tertiary” treatment system.

We will remain stuck in Year 10 at WooBoo High while other towns along our coastline have long moved on to Melbourne University.

How does a “Year 10 system” (as I like to call it) that still shoots shite into the ocean fit with our claim to be a clean, green, cosmopolitan, hydrogen-fuelled-FOGO-climate-change-emergency-aware Warrnambool?

It makes a mockery of that claim.

We can’t just keep saying we want to change the way we do things: we have to actually CHANGE.

But there is a problem.

The cut-off date for us to have a say via the EPA about this treatment plant upgrade is 17 June.

The EPA told me today that this deadline had already been extended by a week because of C19.

A week is not long enough. We need more time.

I don’t know about you, but I still don’t know what day it is and I haven’t been home schooling kids while trying to work, cook, clean the house and keep up with the rates notices.

We need more time to make sure we have our say and to get this absolutely right – to demand more for our coastline – and I hope the EPA agrees.

[You can find more detail on the EPA consultation here.]