Work continues to build Muskoka’s largest [in volume]pumping station at 20 Mountview Drive. The pumping station will receive about half of the Town of Huntsville’s sewage and pump it to an expanded and improved Golden Pheasant Wastewater Treatment Plant on Hwy. 60 for treatment, thereby forgoing the dated Mountview Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is scheduled to be decommissioned in 2027.
During a tour of the Mountview plant, we asked District Director of Water and Wastewater Services Michael Currie whether going down to just one plant was better than two. He said the issue had been thoroughly studied by experts, and expanding the Golden Pheasant plant to take all of Huntsville’s wastewater was the preferred option from both a strategic and a financial perspective. Currie also noted that the Mountview plant was once the only treatment plant in Huntsville. The plant was constructed in 1959 and expanded in 1972, but the technology is now dated.
Treatment at the Golden Pheasant Plant will be covered and emit cleaner effluence than this treatment process at the Mountview Wastewater Treatment Plant.
“Because of its age and its inability to produce higher quality effluence, we started in 2014 an environmental assessment process to decide what to do—whether it was to replace the plant onsite, do some upgrades—ultimately the answer was consolidate all of the flows by building a sewage pump station on site here, which is what we’re doing, and then a force main on the other side of town at the Golden Pheasant [plant],” explained Currie. “So we’ll be able to take the Town of Huntsville flows up to, I think, 289 litres per second, so by volume, this will be the largest station that we have in the District of Muskoka.” According to engineers, the pumping station is rated for 300 to 400 litres per second with the ability to expand if required. “It’ll serve wastewater treatment in Huntsville for many, many years to come and it… incorporates future development and expansion of the town,” added Currie.
The Golden Pheasant plant was built in the 1990s, and upgrades are being made to it so that it can handle all of the Town of Huntsville’s sewage. Some of the upgrades completed to date have enabled the District to nearly eliminate ammonia in the plant’s final effluent discharge, explained Currie. “So carrying on with that, a company (Peak Construction Group Ltd,) was awarded earlier this year the next phase to provide increased tankage and systems to be able to handle the flow from here (Mountview), send it across town through force mains and then have the sewage plant also receive this higher level of treatment. So there’s kind of multiple projects happening all at once,” explained Currie. “We need to be able to not only gather water at a pumping station, but we need to also have the ability to convey it, so a part of this project that will be going to construction later on [is]to calculate all the way through what size of force main is required to match these future flows.” Neither Main Street nor King William will be dug up again for the project, but Currie said some of the side streets of Huntsville will be.
“Much of the work will be done by horizontal directional drilling, so it will occur underneath the streets; there is some upgrade work planned in partnership with the Town of Huntsville for surface [treatments]that were already targeted for upgrades, including Meadow Park Drive,” said Currie. There will also be new piping installed along Hwy. 60 to accommodate an increase in flows but not on the driven part of Hwy. 60. Currie said the pipes will be buried off to the side.
All of the construction work associated with directing flows to one plant and decommissioning the other is expected to be completed by the end of 2026. The Town of Huntsville gets its water from Fairy Lake, upstream from the outflow from the Golden Pheasant plant, which is located by Scotts Point on Fairy Lake
“It’s quite a ways downstream. It’s outside of the intake protection zone. This isn’t something we come up with ourselves. It’s thoroughly reviewed by the regulators, Ministry of the Environment, and different provincial health units…,” noted Currie. He ventured that the effluent coming out of the Golden Pheasant Wastewater Treatment Plant is often cleaner than the water it goes into.
The project is being done in phases. In February, the District awarded North America Construction $15.7 million to expand the Golden Pheasant plant. Once the work is done, the plant’s capacity will almost double to just over 8,000 cubic metres per day.
The approved budget for the Golden Pheasant/Mountview Project (Golden Pheasant upgrades, Mountview Pumping Station, and force mains) will cost approximately $86.4M, explained James Steele, District Commissioner of Engineering and Public Works. You can find the breakdown here.
Huntsville Mayor Nancy Alcock said that at one point, she had concerns that Huntsville might be running out of service capacity, particularly when it was noted that if all draft-approved developments were to move forward and connect to the system, Huntsville would be at 85 per cent capacity. That changed with new District policy limiting the amount of time draft-approved developments can sit on water and sewer allocations without using them. “That 85 per cent at capacity level… drops substantially. If someone who has approval from 20 years ago comes tomorrow and says I have my draft approval, well, you have to get in line now for that and get your ducks in order and go through the application process, and I think that’s entirely fair.”
Alcock said the treatment from the Golden Pheasant plant is state of the art compared to Mountview. “It’s so much better. It’s better for the environment. Yes, it’s a lot of money, but it just elevates all of our infrastructure in our municipality.”
A small section of the 3.75-acre Mountview property will be taken up by the new pumping station. Mountview and Fairvern are both waterfront properties located right next to one another, and the Town is interested in both. “It’s an exciting opportunity,” said Alcock. She said she’d like to see a continuation of Huntsville’s waterfront trail with as much green open space as possible on both of those sites. As for the Fairvern site in particular, Alcock said she sees a lot of potential there for some kind of affordable housing.
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Massively expensive water and sewer projects like this is why Muskoka has the highest cost services in Ontario.
How much has been spent?
Rapidly approaching a BILLION!! dollars for only 12,000 connections.
Typical water and sewer cost here?
$200/month or $2,400!! per year.
Including the cost shown/hidden on our property taxes.
Many people are not aware $1,000+ of water and sewer cost is actually on our property taxes under District Water A and District Sewer A.
Not just the amount shown on our water and sewer bills.
No other municipality shows/hides massive costs like that on property taxes.
Costs are so high here it’s possible to SAVE $1,000/year with extreme water conservation/substitution as shown on the website “Oppose Bracebridge Sewers.”
Use sump pump water to flush your toilet is just one example.
Another is put a $10 WiFi cam on your water meter so you can more easily detect silent leaks immediately instead of 2 months later when you get a massive bill.