REGINA – A Regina citizen’s group said it’s confident it has enough petition signatures to force a referendum on a public private partnership for the new wastewater treatment plant.
It will be the first referendum in the city since 1991.
“I don’t have an exact count, but I think we picked up over one thousand signatures over the weekend,” said Jim Holmes, spokesperson for Regina Water Watch.
They don’t yet have the final numbers, but they know they’re close. Holmes said more than 20,000 people have signed their petition since March.
“Our sampling and our examination of the signatures convinces us that there’s no question that we’re going to have enough – and enough valid signatures,” he added.
They are hoping they have more than they need – last week, the City of Regina made a last minute request to the province to increase the threshold from 19,300 signatures to 20,750 to reflect health card information instead of 2011 census numbers. Minister of government relations, Jim Reiter said he would make a decision by Tuesday.
“The city decided for some reason, as we we’re getting close that the number should move. It’s just appalling,” said Holmes.
Now the group is worried there may still be loopholes to jump through. Water Watch has received most of its financial support from the Canadian Union of Public Employees, but is made up of about 180 volunteers. Holmes said he’s concerned the city might try to dispute the validity of the signatures they’ve gathered.
“We’ve lost any integrity in the city’s process,” he said.
However, the mayor says he’s not worried about a binding referendum.
“This is democracy. If you can get ten percent of the population requesting that a petition be done and held for referendum, we’ll do that,” he said.
Still, the mayor cautions, scrapping the P3 plan would be costly: “Possibly higher debt, certainly a mill rate increase could happen because of it. We’re anticipating at this point we would have that $58 and a half million and we’d lose that opportunity.”
Both sides say they want the least costly option for the city. Council argues that the $58.5 million, which is investment from the federal government tied to a private public partnership, as well as $118 million upfront investment from the private partner, will save the city from debt and interest. Meanwhile Regina Water Watch says it will cost the city more over the long-term to pay the private firm to operate and maintain the facility.
The deadline to bring the petition forward is Thursday.
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