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Fieldstone residents to pay for wastewater treatment, says Mono mayor

March 14, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

Mono Mayor John Creelman said he feels there is much misinformation circulating about the water system in the municipality’s Fieldstone subdivision.

A Mono resident forwarded a written question to council during its March 11 meeting. Ranjan Mukherjee asked about the status of the Fieldstone subdivision’s water system.

Mayor John Creelman said he has been contacted by residents a number of times over social media about water and wastewater in that area of the town, north of Highway 9 and east of First Line EHS.

“We never, ever suggested that water and wastewater charges would be absorbed into the general tax levy,” Creelman said. “That they would somehow magically go away when the town assumed responsibility for the wastewater treatment plant.”

As with other Mono subdivisions and Ontario municipalities, taxpayers pay separate rates for their potable water and their sewage treatment. But for reasons Creelman said he can’t discern, some Fieldstone subdivision residents believe they’re off the hook for the wastewater charges.

“There is an impression in that subdivision of 344 homes that as soon as we adopt the plant – which has problems, and we’ve never made a secret of that – somehow or another the charges will vanish,” he said. “They will not vanish.”

A wastewater treatment plant that services that area of Mono is currently operated by Brookfield Homes, the outfit that developed the subdivision. The town will eventually assume responsibility for that utility.

To best disabuse any residents of the misconception, Creelman quoted from an April 2021 letter to residents regarding the wastewater treatment facility at 55 French Drive.

“The monthly rate includes the cost to operate the plant plus a reserve contribution for future repairs and maintenance, or replacement at its end of life,” Creelman read. “The cost recovery to homeowners to operate the plant will not go away upon town assumption of the works. It is a local service for the 344 homes in Fieldstone subdivision and represents the costs of running the wastewater treatment plant for your subdivision.”

The idea that those costs will go away is akin to the idea that charges for electricity to households would be folded into residential taxes.

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

Councillor Melinda Davie said some municipalities bill residents on a quarterly basis for water and wastewater.

“And everybody pays into the one system,” Davie said.

But other places where she’d lived didn’t have a water bill, she said.

“It just was included,” she said. “But that’s when the entire municipality is supplied by the whole system and together everybody’s paying for it.”

When there are 9,000 people in a town and 344 homes in Fieldstone, she said it stands to reason that they will pay.

Davie asked what is to change for those residents when the town eventually takes over the treatment plant?

“They are demanding that we set a date for the completion of the works by the developer and our assumption (of the facility),” the mayor said. “That, of course, we can’t do because we don’t know when that job is going to get done.”

He said the developer should foot the bill for those costs rather than having them land on the users.

“What changes when we take it over?” Davie said.

“Nothing,” Creelman replied.

“The residents are not paying for the problems right now,” said Mike Dunmore, the town’s CAO. “We’re paying for operations.”

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