Frustration Grows as Water Woes Stymie 15,000-Home Scheme

Clarification: The Urban Developer initially reported that Walker Corporation’s Appin development was not serviced by sewerage mains. This was incorrect—all of its developments in Appin are connected to underground mains sewer systems. This article has been edited to correct that error. While Sydney Water grapples with the years-long ‘mystery balls’ saga, a community 65km to the west of the NSW capital’s CBD is dealing with its own wastewater woes. A planned and approved 15,000-home greenfield development at Appin will have construction capped at 2499 houses until infrastructure can rolled out. Wastewater is chief among the struggles. At Appin, homes have been built with connections to underground mains sewers as a prerequisite, with developer Walker staging delivery in line with infrastructure rollout. But some homeowners who have managed to build and move into the new community at nearby Wilton are currently having their sewage trucked out. Wollondilly Shire mayor Matt Gould told The Urban Developer that, while there was never an expectation for all infrastructure to be immediately available, the delays and lack of timeline are frustrating. “What we need is a clear plan and a clear commitment as to what infrastructure is going to be provided at what point, so that we don’t continue to see the types of issues that we have seen at Wilton,” Gould said. “We have got people who have bought land [in Wilton] that can’t be developed because it can’t be serviced by sewerage. We have a community that is having its sewage trucked out on a daily basis, because the system isn’t in place to support land that has already been rezoned. While electrification of the train line, and appropriate hospital services are also pressing concerns, Gould says that wastewater in particular “is certainly the most acute issue. It’s gotten to a point where it’s stalling the development”. Meanwhile, with beachgoers to the Harbour City regularly confronting tarry substances (a combination of oils and human waste) washing up on shore, Sydney Water has now identified a mammoth fatberg stuck in the system near the Malabar Treatment Plant as the culprit. ▲ The dramatic fatberg saga has prompted a planned $3-billion upgrade to Sydney’s wastewater systems. In response, the Minns government announced in January a 10-year, $3-billion plan to overhaul the city’s wastewater infrastructure. That program will be funded by Sydney Water customers, with the first $750-million tranche already approved by the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal. But water economics and engineering consultant Professor Peter Coombes told The Urban Developer that the root of the problem lies with the approach to infrastructure development and funding. “It’s a really messy situation. There are no rewards for those who just sit down and work out what we call ‘the resilience pathway’,” Coombes said. “There’s policy and planning issues. The Australian magic pudding—increasing the density of development in more places, and everything will be OK using the same infrastructure as in the past—that’s not going to work very well. “We have a set-and-forget infrastructure mindset.” According to Gould, Sydney Water is in discussions with the council about upgrade work on a treatment plant, which will allow services to 4000 lots (or double the number that can currently be serviced). But that’s only a drop in the bucket when it comes to development in the area. “One of the challenges we have is this question of a water recycling facility. If that will happen and, if so, when that will happen,” Gould said. ▲ Planned upgrades will help existing services catch up, but future growth in Wollondilly is still unaccounted for. “From what we understand, it’s been further delayed up to 2036 at the moment. By 2035, more than 3600 homes in Wilton will be unserviced if the infrastructure delays persist.” According to Coombes, big and slow-moving infrastructure rollouts are a major problem, and an unnecessary one. Coombes has worked on a project that considered decentralised wastewater treatment strategies as an alternative to large infrastructure projects. “The utility wants a certain budget or else it’s not going to deliver infrastructure, and they only want to deliver their type of solution, which is something massive and up-front and centralised. Whereas the answer is actually building a decentralised solution that grows with the area,” he says. “In the end your sewer system is huge, because you’re transporting stormwater at a factor of 6:1. If you’re doing that for 250km at a time, the costs are massive compared to building smaller local plants that’ll serve for the next 10 years. There’s a higher cost per megalitre, but from a systems perspective it’s an order of magnitude cheaper and less environmentally damaging.” Supporting lower demand can also help reduce infrastructure costs, and speed up delivery. “My own house runs off rainwater, solar energy and battery storage with backup from the grid. Our peak demands are 90 per cent less than a normal house, so the impacts on the infrastructure must be considerably less. But our centralised thinking doesn’t want to account for that,” Coombes says. “What we actually need, in water infrastructure, is taking all the solutions we can get. Reducing the impacts on water and taking into account what Australians are doing at a non-utility scale, rather than having greater fixed charges, more and bigger infrastructure.” ▲ A systems thinking approach to planning, funding and delivering water infrastructure will be faster and cheaper, Coombes says. Funding mindset and model flawed A systems thinking approach might plan, cost, and build infrastructure with regard to components like demand reduction by the end user. Coombes has priced community contributions in Sydney’s water network, in the form of reduced household usage, at somewhere in the order of $8 billion to $17 billion. In Wollondilly Shire, the arguments over who should pay for infrastructure have been as fierce as those over the delays. “We’ve got thousands of lots that have been rezoned, and there’s actually no commitment that that infrastructure money will be provided,” Gould said. “Except on a case-by-case basis of going and arguing and fighting with the various agencies and pushing the issues. Which, for basic infrastructure, we shouldn’t have to do.” According to Coombes, the models and philosophy of infrastructure funding are behind delivery problems. “If you’re a monopoly—and this is in chapters on monopolies in economic textbooks everywhere—you’re going to claim you need more and more money ... There’s so much vested economics in the old way of doing things,” Coombes said. ▲ Infrastructure planning should emphasise long-term resilience, rather than expensive and reactive overbuilds. Reactions to flashpoints such as the Millennium Drought, and the fatberg, result in silver bullet infrastructure such as the desalination plant, or a proposed water-recycling solution. “It’s documented and peer-reviewed that claims of urgent diminished capacity and dire consequences are more related to grant funding and corporate budgets and so on,” Coombes said. “[The crisis narrative] has gone on since settlement, and probably before that. It’s what humans do. If you read [colonial newspaper] The Argus , you just need to go by the headlines: the floods and the droughts and ‘the Tank Stream’s not working’.” But Coombes emphasises that contributions from all stakeholders—utility providers, agencies, developers, and community—will need to be recognised in order to deliver a resilient infrastructure pathway, as future challenges emerge. “As humans we gravitate towards silver bullets. We survive disasters by pulling together and everyone contributing, but we tend to forget that in the aftermath.” While Gould is not calling for any particular funding solution, he is adamant that his council is prepared to support development once the money is stumped up, and the pipes are rolled out. “[The] council is willing to enable growth, but it requires the infrastructure investment. We will continue to struggle to see Wilton reach its potential, and be able to properly provide for the land if that infrastructure investment does not eventuate.”

Frustration Grows as Water Woes Stymie 15,000-Home Scheme

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