Water and the sustainability of the local aquifer has been a point of contention since the Northern Supportive Recovery Centre for Women was proposed.
On Tuesday the proponents for the centre pledged to haul water in for facility, rather than drawing it from the well on site.
City council will be holding a public hearing on the proposed rezoning of the site on Leslie Road from rural residential to a special therapeutic community zoning. City planning staff have recommended that city council not approve final reading of the rezoning bylaw until a covenant is registered on the property to ensure the site's well is deactivated.
"The covenant should be in a form and content acceptable to the director of planning and development that specifies the property may only be used for a community care facility (i.e. recovery centre) if the building is disconnected from any existing well, no future wells are connected, and instead the building is connected to water storage cisterns," city current planning and development manager Nelson Wight wrote in his report to city council.
Once operational, the centre would require a water delivery of 15,898 litres every two days, Wight added. The former school has two cisterns with a combined capacity of 37,854 litres.
According to an engineer's report by David McWalter, the sewage lagoons on the site have a combined disposal capacity of 9,040 litres of sewage per day.
The addiction treatment centre is expected to produce 12,500 litres a day of sewage and waste water, McWalter wrote, so the lagoons will need to be expanded prior to opening of the facility.
Northern Health is responsible for overseeing water treatment systems, he added, and an application will need to be made to Northern Health for approval.
Environmental consultant Dennis Ableson conducted a survey of 152 private wells in the Haldi Road area and found many to have limited flow from their wells - 42 per cent had a flow of less than 9.1litres per minute.
