It was about a year ago that a group of concerned Millbrookarea residents packed Cavan Monaghan Tow nship council chambers to have their say on a plan to pipe Millbrook water to a proposed new community in Fraserville.

On Tuesday, that plan was dealt its death blow in a 3-2 vote by township council.

“This is the end of a long journey,” said Jane Zednik, who has been part of the grassroots effort to stop the pipeline plan since Day 1.

Coun. Fern Armstrong, who represents Millbrook on township council, introduced a motion at Tuesday’s meeting to kill the water diversion plan. That motion was seconded by Cavan Ward Coun. Jim Chaplin and supported by North Monaghan Ward Coun. Tim Belch, who was appointed to council earlier this year.

“Not a good day,” Reeve Neal Cathcart said Tuesday night.

“We’ve killed the development. No water, no development.”

The end of the Millbrook diversion plan doesn’t mean the end of the Fraserville project, Chaplin said. Official Plan 6, which outlines the proposed residential development, calls for the construction of a water and sewage treatment facility.

“We have federal and provincial funding for that; it doesn’t stipulate where the water comes from,” Chaplin said.

“It’s too early to say what the source would be, but there are plenty of other sources. There’s a lot of water under the ground here.”

But Cathcart said it’s unlikely the Fraserville development can happen without the Millbrook diversion plan.

“We’ve looked for water elsewhere,” he said. “There isn’t any.”

Chaplin said Tuesday night that yes, he was the councillor who put forward the first motion aimed at exploring a Millbrookto- Fraserville water diversion plan.

“But at that time, we didn’t have the information we have now,” he said.

“Included in that motion (in April 2009) was a requirement that staff carry out research and determine the effect a plan like that would have.”

The township later contracted an outside firm, Golder and Associates, to study the issue; their findings, which supported the plan, were then backed up by a peer review carried out by the Trow consultancy.

This stepped up the efforts of Zednik and others involved in a loose-knit network of activists, who staged a series of awareness events aimed at stopping the project.

“We worked hard at this,” she said.

Chaplin said the protests, which included a petition with more than 2,000 signatures calling for the project to be scrapped, had an effect on him.

“As an elected official, I have a responsibility to listen to the public, but at first, I didn’t really pay much attention to them,” he said. “I looked at it as a group of people saying ‘we don’t like this.’ Well, you’re always going to have people who don’t like something. Tell me why you don’t like it; that’s what they did, and it got through.”

“We worked hard to get council to listen to us,” said Millbrook resident Ed Farrow. “But we got some of them to think about looking into this on their own.”

Chaplin said he spent most of the past year doing his own research — and what he learned changed his mind, he said.

“I spoke to engineers, hydrologists, people who know more than I ever will, and what I learned was that yes, we could divert water to Fraserville — but at what cost to the community as a whole? This affects more than just the drinking water in Millbrook. If the water table were to drop from six metres above ground to two metres below ground, you would see an effect on the artesian wells in Millbrook; these wells feed streams that feed Baxter Creek. If they were to drop, the temperatures in the creek would rise, and that would affect the trout. So it goes beyond drinking water.”

That may be true, said Cathcart, but as the township is still waiting for the results of a Ministry of the Environment study on the project, that will never be known.

“There’s no way the ministry is going to bother finishing this up now that it’s dead,” he said.

“We moved rather hastily when we were close to finding out what the ministry was going to say.”

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