Dawson City residents vote to flush sewage lagoon plan

The majority of Dawson City residents who votedin a controversial referendum Thursdayopposed the Yukon government's efforts to build a court-ordered sewage lagoon near the entrance to town.

With a tally of 300 to 91, more than 75 per cent of voters in Thursday's referendum cast ballots in favour of denying the government permission to build the lagoon on the proposed site, located on Dome Road near the baseball diamonds.

Many residents in the town of 1,300 say the site is too close to First Nations housing and their underground drinking water source. They also accused the government and the town of imposing the proposed site on them without their input.

"I feel vindicated," Jorn Meier, a concerned resident who spearheaded the Yes campaign, told CBC News after the votes were tallied Thursday night.

"Many people have said from the beginning, 'Dawsonites don't want it here.' And nobody really listened to it."

The Yes vote aims to force the Yukon government to find a more suitable site for the $17-million sewage treatment facility.

Both government and Dawson City officials have been under pressure to build the lagoon since 2003, when the territorial court fined the town $5,000 for dumping raw sewage into the Yukon River.

Mayor John Steins said he's now worried about how the court will react to Thursday's vote, as it may interpret the residents' wishes as contempt of the long-standing court order.

"This is a court matter and now it creates a conflict," Steins said, noting that federal Crown prosecutors had suggested more charges and fines are possible.

Steins said he also fears the territorial government's reaction, given its engineers have spent the last three years planning the lagoon project.

"We had an agreement to build a lagoon. Now that the people have spoken against having a lagoon, we have no memorandum of understanding and there's no obligation on [the Yukon government's] part to carry on here," he said.

There was no word Thursday on how the government plans to proceed. Its lawyers, as well as town officials, are due back in territorial court in April to discuss progress on the project.