Cavan Monaghan Township won’t show the public test results of a controversial water well diversion proposal so some township residents have filed freedom of information applications to get them.

A few Millbrook residents, who say the results should be public, have appealed to the provincial privacy commissioner hoping to force Cavan Monaghan Township to release its reservoir of information on water tests done to support Fraserville development.

The township refused requests from residents to see test results on a Moore Dr. well site that the municipality considered using to provide water for future growth in Fraserville.

The well site is on private property.

Martin Leahy, with Cavan Springs bottled water company, wouldn’t comment on the study.

“It’s not for sale,” he said of 1277 Moore Dr. “We don’t really have any interest in dealing with anybody at this time.”

Now the township plans to take water from the Millbrook wells using a 12-kilometre pipe to Fraserville at an estimated $30-million cost for the project that would include a water treatment plant.

Lyell Shields is one of the Millbrook residents who want to see the test results from a Moore Dr. well site that the township rejected before it changed its plans to take water from Millbrook.

“That was the well that was identified (in the Fraserville Secondary Plan), and at that time it was identified as perfectly suitable,” he said on Friday. “It benefits the developers for them to use the Millbrook wells… The costs of accessing the water would be much less than if (the township) had to bring their pipes down to the village.”

Jane Zednik said she is one of the residents who filed a Freedom of Information request for the well test results for 1277 Moore Dr. -the Cavan Springs bottled water company property.

The request for information is under arbitration through the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Shields said.

“We just need to see the tests,” he said. “George Bush said there were weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq)… they never did find any.”

Township staff wouldn’t comment on the Moore Dr. well site.

“We have no comment,” planning director Karen Ellis said.

The township paid a consultant to do the well test but it can’t release the test to the public because it doesn’t own the information or the property, Reeve Neal Cathcart said.

“The purchase of the well and that property was conditional on it meeting the Ministry of the Environment standards on community water… There’s a high standard for community wells ever since Walkerton and everybody knows that,” he said, adding the water didn’t meet the standard. “Those tests are privileged to the owner.

“We can’t let it go because we don’t own it.”

Cathcart said the township considered several properties on Moore Dr.