Yukon Water Board approves new 20-year licence for Whitehorse dam
Decision was last major hurdle for Yukon Energy to keep operating the contentious facility
The Yukon Water Board has approved a new, 20-year operating licence for Yukon Energy's hydroelectric dam in Whitehorse. It was the last major hurdle for Yukon Energy in its years-long effort to renew its licence for the facility.
The decision issued by the Water Board this week follows a hearing earlier this month, where regulators heard concerns about the 67-year-old dam's impacts on fish, water levels, land use and traditional culture.
Yukon Energy's request for a new 20-year licence was earlier cleared by the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board. The company now must secure authorization under the federal Fisheries Act.
The decision from the Water Board lays out a list of conditions for how the company must run the facility, including how to manage water levels upstream on Marsh Lake, and also ensure the fish ladder at the dam is operating properly to ensure fish passage.
Through the relicensing process, First Nations and environmental groups expressed serious concerns about the dam's historical and ongoing impact on fish populations in the Yukon River, in particular chinook salmon.
Among other things, the water licence requires Yukon Energy to submit a new operations and maintenance plan for the fish ladder by the end of the year. The company also has until May to submit an updated operations and maintenance manual, and an updated emergency preparedness plan.
Piers McDonald, chair of the Yukon Water Board, said the new licence's "big innovation" is a requirement for Yukon Energy to work with local First Nations — Kwanlin Dün, Carcross/Tagish, and the Ta'an Kwäch'än Council — on a "monitoring and adaptive management plan" for the facility. The licence requires ongoing consultation and collaboration "to address a a long list of issues ... that have cropped up over time," he said.
"Back in the day, the nature of consultation was much different. It was either absent or it was very limited, and it did leave some sore feelings, so to speak, that really have never evaporated."
He said the new licence attempts to address some of the those issues by laying out an approach for shared decision-making on the dam's operations.
"There's an expectation that they [Yukon Energy] work co-operatively and positively, constructively, with First Nations to come up with new approaches to their operation. And it's a feature that we're experimenting with," McDonald said.
"We have high expectations that it'll be productive," he said.
The licence also requires the dam undergo a third-party safety inspection every year and a full safety review of the dam, the Lewes control structure and fishway upstream and the Lewes boat lock every five years. The first such review must be done by November.
Other conditions deal with erosion monitoring, water quality, wetland preservation and fish habitat. They also spell out how Yukon Energy must work with local First Nations on some of its monitoring and management plans.
The water licence is in effect as of Thursday and is set to expire in July 2045.
With files from Elyn Jones