Time to Speak Out: CRD Plans to Turn Willis Point Road into a Heavy Industrial Truck Corridor
Willis Point Road to Become Main Access Point for Hartland Landfill
Summary: Hartland Road has been the access point for Hartland Landfill for almost half a century. Now the CRD has a plan to divert all the trucks and vehicles that access the Landfill from Hartland Road to Willis Point Road, ostensibly to improve truck operations and management of the Landfill which will be significantly expanded over the coming years to extend its usable life. This is in addition to trucks that will be using Willis Point Road to remove treated biosolid sewage waste and quarried aggregate. No meaningful consultation has been held with stakeholders including regional residents who use Willis Point Road for access to Gowlland Tod Provincial Park and Mtount Work Regional Park, including Durrance Lake, not to mention residents of Willis Point and Highlands, who use it as their only access road. The CRD commissioned a flawed study to try to justify this move, a study that failed to identify significant environmental, safety and social implications of moving the Landfill access to Willis Point Road. No options that would keep access on Hartland Avenue have been seriously considered. It is time for concerned stakeholders to speak out and demand that municipal politicians acting as CRD Directors review and rescind this ill-considered move.
The Hartland Landfill has been Greater Victoria’s only garbage disposal site since the 1970s and has been operated by the CRD since 1985. It actually opened as a private dump site back in the 1950s. During all that period up to the present day, the primary access point to the Landfill has been Hartland Avenue in Saanich, a road that terminates at “the dump”.
In the early 1990s Willis Point Road was constructed to provide, among other things, a direct access road to the community of Willis Point that did not require crossing DND land and would not be subject to random closures when the rifle range was in use. That road also provides good access to Mount Work Park, Durrance Lake and Gowlland Tod Park’s Mackenzie Bight area and, in addition, is a back door to the Landfill. That is where the new biosolid treatment plant is being constructed and it is from this north gate that trucks will remove dewatered biosolids for shipment to an incineration plant in Vancouver—down Willis Point Road.
Over the years, the waste stream ending up at Hartland has changed, and as recycling has taken hold, volumes per capita have decreased although the population of the region is growing, especially on the West Shore. Despite the per capita reduction in waste, Hartland is filling up and it is estimated that at present rates of disposal, it will be full by 2045. Thus the CRD has launched a long-term plan to extend the life of Hartland to 2100. To do this it will work to reduce the amount of material deposited by increasing recycling and education while at the same time, expanding the capacity of Hartland by quarrying and removal of aggregate. Quarrying is not new but in the past the aggregate generated was used onsite. Now the amount generated will exceed the amount needed for coverage and will be removed by truck—also down Willis Point Road.
Both of these activities will, of course, increase heavy truck traffic on a road that is the primary access for a heavily used provincial and regional park, plus the communities of Willis Point and Highlands. It is also becoming increasingly used as a shortcut to and from the West Shore. Traffic has increased on Willis Point Road by about 10% annually over the past few years.
With good planning, the regular users of the road and the additional truck traffic mentioned above could probably co-exist but now the CRD has come up with a new wrinkle. As outlined in a new document, “Extending the Life of Hartland Landfill”, the CRD has revealed that it intends to divert truck traffic currently using Hartland Road to access the Landfill, to Willis Point Road. The rationale given is as follows:
“The existing access road (Hartland Avenue) has some steep and narrow sections that are challenging for larger trucks. In the future trucks that are able to use the automated scale will be directed to use the Willis Point Road access, which provides a safer route. This is expected to move about 80 trucks per day from Hartland Avenue to Willis Point Road. Smaller vehicles (about 320 per day) will still access the landfill via Hartland Avenue.”
This suggests that there is some imperative requiring trucks to change routes; that they cannot continue to use Hartland Avenue, and that Willis Point is a safer route. This conclusion is not borne out by the facts.
Trucks have successfully used Hartland Avenue for close to half a century. What has changed now?
We, and members of the CRD Board, have had feedback from haulers that they are not pushing for this change.*
The CRD commissioned a traffic study from a consulting firm, Bunt and Associates, to conduct a traffic and safety study designed to evaluate whether trucks and indeed all traffic could be diverted to Willis Point Road. This report, Hartland Alternate Access Analysis (Appendix A), was clearly designed to come up with the conclusion that CRD staff wanted.
The study concluded there were no negative environmental, safety or social implications from moving not only truck traffic but all Landfill traffic from Hartland Avenue to Willis Point Road.
A Seriously Flawed Document
The report completely ignored the social implications of heavy truck traffic on a road heavily used by motorists and cyclists as the only access road to significant recreational areas (Willis Point Road), and distorted the facts in assessing safety for trucks, motorists and cyclists when comparing the two access points.
It claimed that cyclists using the Interurban Trail would benefit from lack of truck traffic on Hartland Road while ignoring the implications of using Wallace Drive (which becomes part of the Interurban Bike Trail after the intersection with West Saanich Road) as a route for trucks. Cyclists will have to share the road with trucks headed for and from the Landfill.
The study claimed that the site lines for turning trucks from Hartland were more dangerous than the proposed alternate route via West Saanich to Wallace to Willis Point Road. Apart from the fact that the new route involves no less than three left turns across traffic (West Saanich to Wallace; Wallace to Willis Point Road; Willis Point Road to the Landfill gate) as opposed to just one (West Saanich to Hartland), the study ignores the danger of turning right on to West Saanich Road from Wallace Drive. Vehicles coming fast down the hill on West Saanich heading south are hard to see when turning right, and slow trucks moving into this traffic flow will inevitably cause accidents.
The study failed to consider the impact of increased GHG emissions on Willis Point Road and nearby parks. While admitting that growth on Willis Point Road has averaged 10 percent per year, it states, without any substantiation, that this rate of growth is unlikely to continue in future. In fact, the study documents that traffic growth is stable on Hartland Avenue and has not increased over many years.
In short, the study is a seriously flawed document that should not be relied on to justify a major decision that will impact users of the parks from throughout the region, not to mention the residents whose sole access road will now be clogged by truck and other traffic to the Landfill, if the CRD steamrollers this change through.
In further discussions with CRD officials, they have admitted that the long term plan is to move all access to the Willis Point Road north gate, and to close the Hartland Road access. The rationale given is that this will make it easier to manage Hartland expansion.
It is sensible that future planning for Hartland’s extended use take place, although common sense would dictate that other options, such as establishing a disposal site on the West Shore, should also be put on the agenda. It makes no sense for the long term for waste from the West Shore, the fastest growing part of the region, to continue to be trucked to Hartland for the next eight decades.
In the meantime, no alternative scenarios have been presented that would mitigate the negative effects on the broader community of changing the Landfill’s access to Willis Point Road. There appears to be no real need other than the desire of the managers of Hartland to manage the expansion in a way that is most advantageous for them—yet producing the most negative impacts for the community.
It is important for stakeholders across the region—cyclists, recreational anglers at Durrance Lake, swimmers and families using Mount Work and Gowlland Tod parks, residents of communities that rely on Willis Point Road for access to their homes—to speak out and inform their representatives on the CRD that this plan needs to be re-thought. There has been no meaningful community consultation, no options offered, and no willingness to date to reconsider.
It is time to speak out.
Here’s how:
View the CRD Environmental Committee meeting at which this issue was discussed
*http://crd.ca.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=1&clip_id=1745