The biosolids controversy has not gone away in Red Rock.
Owners of land neighbouring a 30-hectare tree farm where the City plans to spread about 60 truckloads of the material this summer say they remain concerned despite a meeting Thursday evening with officials to get further details on the proposal.
"They're never going to convince us that this is 100-per-cent safe," Richard Johnson said Friday.
However, they're resigned to seeing the trucks come through once the road has firmed up enough to support their weight.
"They said they're going to go ahead with this and monitor everything and make sure they're safe and hopefully that's what they do," said Johnson, who lives about 3.5 kilometres west of the site at the end of Patterson Road.
"We told them that 10 years down the road we don't want them to say that maybe they made a mistake."
Assurances that the City and Sylvis, the environmental consultant hired to oversee the process, will be liable for anything that goes wrong left Ken Bielert with cold comfort.
"The fact is science is based on probabilities and every once in awhile they figure out they're dead wrong," said Bielert, whose property is adjacent to the tree farm.
"That doesn't do me any good if my grandchildren are poisoned from playing down in the creek."
Red Rock residents first learned of the plan nearly a year-and-a-half ago creating an uproar in the community.
The material, a form of fertilizer but with peat-like qualities and holding a high moisture content, is made from the sludge at the Lansdowne sewage treatment plant and is classified as class B under the province's organic matter recycling regulation.
It takes a less-stringent process to make class B biosolids than class A, but contains more pathogens and heavy metals and there are greater restrictions on how much can be applied to the land.
Moreover, according to the province's organic matter recycling regulation, when the amount of fecal coliform reaches a certain level (1,000 MPN or most probable number per gram) several restrictions come into place, notably that they can be applied only to sites with restricted public access.
Even when below that level, they cannot be applied any closer than 30 metres from water sources and property zoned for homes or recreation and not when the groundwater table is within one metre of the surface.
Bielert said he does not understand why it's being applied to land roughly one kilometre from where he lives when there is so much other land well away from settled areas where it could be used, notably publicly-owned Crown land.
"I understand they need to do something with it and put it somewhere... but the only reason they want to do that is because they want to put it on private land [for liability reasons] and because they want to save on trucking costs," Bielert said.
Once started, trucking the material is expected to take two weeks and spreading it will take two months.
City utilities manager Marco Fornari said extra monitoring will be in place in answer to concerns the material won't be disked into the soil like it would be on a traditional farm site.
The City also plans to spread the material over a farm in Salmon Valley. A meeting on that proposal drew about 50 people to the community's fire hall on Wednesday evening.
