volume 1 - Halifax Regional Municipality

Halifax Water Integrated Resource Plan
Executive Summary
ES 1.
INTEGRATED RESOURCE PLANNING
The Halifax Regional Water Commission (HWRC) known as Halifax Water is a publicly
owned utility charged with providing water, wastewater and stormwater services to the
residents of Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM). Halifax Water embarked on the
preparation of an Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) in order to define its overall program
and resource needs for the next thirty years (2013 - 2043). The IRP responds to the
combined requirements of regional growth, present and expected regulatory
compliance and asset renewal. The IRP is being prepared at the direction of the Nova
Scotia Utility and Review Board (NSUARB) in collaboration with the Tellus Institute who
are helping guide the preparation of the IRP.
The IRP is a high level plan prepared under considerable time constraint. Plan
development strove for completeness. Where data or other information was not
available, the best professional judgment of the study team was employed. This
resulted in a number of assumptions, which are documented throughout the report.
The lack of data in some cases does represent a risk that new information may require
adjustments to proposed programs and costs. This is an invariable aspect of all major
planning undertakings, particularly those that look 30 years into the future.
Halifax Water has a talented and highly professional staff with demonstrated capacity to
adapt to changing circumstances. An adaptive management approach will certainly be
needed as changing regulations, growth estimates and new information about asset
condition and performance is considered. The recommended IRP should therefore be
considered the first step in an on-going and evolving process of continuous
improvement.
The IRP represents an important component of Halifax Water’s financial planning. It
feeds into subsequent studies that examine debt requirements to meet capital
programs and into utility ratemaking. It was not designed to undertake the analysis of
debt or rates as part of IRP preparation. Rather the focus of the IRP preparation was as
follows:
• Capital and additional O&M costs to meet the program and project requirements of
the Recommended IRP for the 30-year planning period from 2013 to 2043
• Development of an overall planning framework integrating the IRP into Halifax
Water’s business processes
• Identification of institutional constraints required to implement the Recommended
IRP
• Recommendations for additions and refinements of Halifax water’s Levels of Service
(LOS) to facilitate the measurement of program success.
Revision: 2012-10-29 Integrated Resource Plan – Executive Summary ES-1
October 31 2012 Page 3 of 272