County conflicted regarding future of Lakes of Muirfield Lagoon Project

By John Watson Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Debate is ongoing by Wheatland County council regarding the potential purchase of land for the proposed Lakes of Muirfield Lagoon project.

Council was unable to come to an agreement regarding fulfilling the purchase conditions of the land outlined for the project and will resume discussion about it in the new year. 

“We have to start doing something … this is costing the county money. Studies, studies, studies, not moving, time is money. I’m not in favour of looking more – I’m in favour of let’s do something. We are all scared to move forward because somebody won’t like it or (the) cost is too much or there is another solution,” said Coun. Glenn Koester. “These are what we are looking at are time and tested solutions that have been in the county for a hundred years. We are not going to get cheaper … we have people complaining that we are not doing something, we have people complaining we are hauling it to the wrong spot – everybody is complaining.”

The Lakes of Muirfield developer signed an agreement with Rocky View County in 2009 to discharge Muirfield’s wastewater into a holding tank at Dalroy. At the time, plans existed for the construction of a lift station and wastewater forcemain from Dalry to the Langdon wastewater treatment plant. 

This lift station remains in operation to date. Wastewater from Dalroy was transported by tanker trucks and disposed of at the Langdon facility for six years.  The original agreement expired in 2015. 

A study was completed by CIMA+ in 2016 approximating the cost and outlining possible wastewater servicing solutions for the Muirfield and Lyalta community. 

Six potential servicing solutions were outlined with varying cost estimates, the lowest of which being an interim wastewater lagoon, servicing within 1.6 km of Lyalta. 

In 2020, CIMA+ completed another study, this time evaluating options for providing long term water and wastewater servicing to Muirfield, Cheadle, and the Highway 1 industrial corridor. 

Proposed options included tying into regional mechanical wastewater treatment plants, or to create local treatment options such as an evaporation lagoon or a regional lagoon.

Wheatland County assumed responsibility for Muirfield’s infrastructure and operations in 2021 which included the daily trucking and hauling of approximately three 30,000-litre trucks of wastewater from Dalroy to the Carseland lagoon. 

The process of manually transporting over 28 million total litres of wastewater one way over a 50 km route costs the county approximately $500,000 annually. In order to reduce costs to residents, the county invested in a wastewater hauling truck to begin transporting waste directly. Initial hauling costs were approximately $160,000 per year. 

Coun. Berle Hebbes raised concerns regarding the distance a lagoon would be transporting water, as well as the potential impact to farmland of developing the project. 

“You are always going to have the concerns back from the landowners no matter where if you put a lagoon out in the farmland, and that argument is going to be every farmer, every acreage guy, every rancher in Wheatland County looks after their own wastewater with sewage that they dig themselves,” he said.

Coun. Shannon Laprise countered, supporting the lagoon as the “only way to go,” being by and large the most cost-effective option put forward to the county as a result of the previous studies. 

“I think all the others are way too expensive from an operating standpoint. We talk about subsidizing; if we went to any of these other options, the operating cost to send this to a wastewater treatment centre is, in my opinion, just completely unrealistic,” she said. “To me, no other option makes sense and no matter where you want to put it, somebody is going to be upset there. That is the nature of the game.”

The Committee of the Whole will return in February to continue discussions about how to proceed with the project.