The city doesn’t have any plans to adopt smart meters any time soon.
Mayor Brian Taylor said that the city would need to do a consultation prior to making any ruling on the BC Hydro metering system.
“We’re not sure whether we want them or not,” Taylor said. “I mean we’re looking at them and what advantages they might provide.”
Taylor said one of the reasons is that there have been questions about how safe the meters are.
“We have that recent scare about more carcinogenic waste in the air,” he said. “Whether smart meters are worthwhile or not I think we’d need to go through a community consultation before we started going in that direction.”
He said that water meters are a different matter.
“We’re currently waiting to hear on funds from the Gas Tax money to go ahead with water meters,” he said. “Council is committed to water meters when we can afford them.”
The process of putting on water meters takes a period of time because they would first do a trial run for a period of time. This would be to get a feeling for how people are going to react to it.
“We want people to monitor their usage,” he said. “Unless we put water meters in, start acting more extensively around our water usage, we’re not going to get government money to subsidize our water needs
Taylor said the city has a lot of water infrastructure problems that it needs to address.
“And unless we’re showing responsibility by putting water meters in, we’re not going to get this much attention on that,” he said.