Squamish asks the province to reopen the Sound's LNG air-quality review
Council's letter cites three years of monitoring data the original certificate never saw.
SQUAMISH — Council voted 5–2 Tuesday to formally ask the province to reopen the air-quality conditions on the Sound's LNG facility, arguing that three years of monitoring data now exist that the original environmental certificate was written without.
The letter is narrower than the debate that produced it. It does not ask to revisit the facility's approval — a fight this council watched a previous council lose — but to update the certificate's air-quality conditions against the actual monitoring record: the inversion-day readings, the marine traffic contribution, and the airshed model that the intervening years have tested.
The district's own air-quality technician, presenting the data, was careful with it: most readings sit inside the certificate's limits, several inversion-day peaks do not, and the question of attribution — terminal, highway, tugs, woodstoves — is exactly what a reopened review would be for.
The province has thirty days to respond and three available answers: reopen, decline, or the middle path of an amended monitoring order, which observers of this file consider the likely landing. The council's letter, its drafters note, was written to make the middle path easy to take.
