Lagoon Road is a short drive that probably most people in Lindsay have never taken. A straight shot alongside the fence line of the landfill, dead-ending at a gate, locked at night, where a sign names the Lindsay Water Pollution Control Plant with an after-hours emergency number. Farther down the fence, a rusted sign is blunter: Biohazard - Authorized Personnel Only. Past the gate lies water: six broad, still ponds you may smell before you see.

My chocolate Lab, Mousse, once found his way past the fence and into that water. He rode home in the back seat of my F-150, and for days the truck carried a rancid smell that outlasted everything I tried. When I asked at the landfill what he had been swimming in, I collected shrugs. The public record was more forthcoming.

What the Lindsay lagoons hold

Under nearly every street in Lindsay runs a second town: pipes carrying whatever the sinks and toilets send. Sewage will not climb hills, so pumping stations push it along – downtown, the north ward – toward one address. At 48 Lagoon Road, a city-owned plant run by a provincial agency, the Ontario Clean Water Agency, cleans and disinfects the flow, then releases it into the Scugog River. The lagoons hold what treatment leaves behind – mostly. Keep that map: every overflow in this story is the same system relieving pressure, whether a riverbank downtown, a ditch at the plant, a basement floor drain. The lagoon is only the part you can smell.

The lagoons are the part that never makes the news. According to the city’s own reports, three of the lagoons hold sewage sludge, treatment’s solid leftovers. None was hauled away from 2022 through 2024. Last fall, 2.4 million kilograms went out for spreading on farmland, a regulated practice. Removals run on a five-year rotation, and the lagoons are about half full. Another, Lagoon 5, does stranger work. Waste from local abattoirs is trucked in and stored there. When storms overload the sewers, raw sewage is parked there until the plant catches up. 

None of that is scandalous: storage is, by the city’s own account, part of how the plant is run. But the water my dog found is plumbing nobody mentions, and the fullest explanation posted at the site is a phone number and the word biohazard.

A cleanup order, then quiet

On a Tuesday morning in December 2018, raw sewage began escaping into the river at the Colborne Street pumping station, one of the stations lifting Lindsay’s waste toward Lagoon Road. About 126,000 litres got out before crews contained it, 20 minutes on; downstream river users were told to filter and disinfect. Two days later, a provincial officer ordered the city to fix the Lagoon Road plant. By the order’s account, the plant had spent more than a year sending water with too much ammonia – toxic to fish at elevated levels – into the river, and an inspection had found vegetation growing in a treatment tank.

The city asked for a review within the week, as the law allows, which was decided inside the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks. There was no courtroom at that stage, no public announcement required. The order was paused while the city got to work and later, as locally reported, put on hold. After that, the record goes quiet. The order made the news when it landed; how it ended – if it has – appears in no story or document I can find.

The fix deserves credit. A project budgeted at more than $22 million replaced the old treatment lagoon with concrete tanks, and when it finished in early 2023 the ammonia problem was, by the city’s numbers, solved.

The construction years are another matter: the city’s 2022 annual report shows the plant breaking its ammonia limit month after month, winter into fall, while its mechanical aerators failed repeatedly. I searched the surviving news archives for that year: nothing. The violations were disclosed, in a report almost nobody would have known to look for.

Forty million litres into the Scugog River

Then came April of last year: spring melt on heavy rain: from April 3-6 one of those pumping stations overflowed into the Scugog: about 40 million litres, according to the city’s annual report, more than three hundred times the 2018 spill. The health unit issued its familiar advisory. Near the station, sewage ran the other way, up floor drains and into basements. The city’s report records the backups - and, for at least one resident, advice to call their insurer. 

Overflow points are an engineered relief valve, used across Ontario; the alternative was more sewage in more basements. The city posted a public notice the day the overflow began. The weather was exceptional, much of what escaped was storm water rather than sewage, the city notes, and the province said it anticipated no adverse environmental impacts from the overflow; the same storm forced another in Fenelon Falls. The basements are harder to wave away.

But the station that overflowed is no relic. The Rivera Park pumping station, an $8-million project (this magazine covered it in 2018), built to move a growing Lindsay’s sewage toward Lagoon Road. The station did what overflow points are designed to do. Barely seven years later, the city’s notice reported flows that had “exceeded the capacity of the system.”

A smaller incident surfaced only in this year’s annual report: about 50,000 litres of raw sewage overflowed the plant’s intake channels into a ditch in March 2025. No news coverage that I can find.

What else lies on Lagoon Road

The same offshoot on Highway 36 serves the Lindsay Ops Landfill, about 500 metres from the Scugog. In 2000, a waste-industry magazine reported that the landfill had leaked since opening in 1980, contaminating groundwater, and that its expansion approval was so mishandled the premier of the day called it “embarrassing.” Today, the city committee overseeing it still keeps “Leachate Outbreaks” as a standing item on its agenda. 

And the ponds, some 70 metres from the river? The landfill’s monitoring report next door does not say everything is fine. It records a “measurable influence” from the plant and its lagoons on the surrounding ground and water. It notes the leakage beneath the ponds has been studied since 1998, and the wells beside them still fail provincial water-quality objectives. The report judges the effect contained, the load small, the river large enough not to notice. Perhaps so. But the ponds seep – and that has been known for a quarter century – and not one line of it appears in the plant’s own reports.

Nobody hid this. Every uncomfortable fact comes from the public record, most of it published by the city itself. The strange part: the record is honest, and it is hard to find. The webpage for the $22-million upgrade has vanished from the city’s rebuilt site, and older annual reports are no longer linked there; you must know a report exists before you can ask. The city held open houses on its water plan in 2023 and 2024. The attendance: just 40 people, then 44 in a subsequent open house, with 13 written submissions in the review – a sliver of the households whose drains run toward Lagoon Road.

I allege no concealment, and I want none inferred. But whatever the intent, the effect is the same: the public memory of this place keeps getting shorter as its importance grows.

$381 Million, and October’s ballot

The danger is not only the ponds. It is a system that speaks one language – too much – and has spoken at least three times in seven years: a spill downtown, a year of broken limits, 40 million litres of overflow from a station built for growth. Add ponds whose seepage is recorded only in the landfill’s paperwork next door, and a town planning to more than triple its population.

The city’s master plan expects Lindsay to grow from about 23,000 people to roughly 77,000 at full buildout, needing nearly double the plant’s treatment capacity. The bill: about $381 million of Lindsay wastewater work, landing in development charges, new-home prices and, where those fall short, water bills. An environmental assessment of the plant’s capacity is set to begin this fall.

What is missing is modest. A plain-language page on what the lagoons hold, and what seeps beneath them. Annual reports a resident can find without knowing to look. And when a public order is issued, a public ending, announced as clearly as the beginning.

The review – and the $381 million – belong to the council Kawartha Lakes elects on October 26. Candidates are glad-handing. Whoever knocks on your door this fall is asking to be responsible for what happens at the end of Lagoon Road. It is fair to ask whether they know what is there.

The gate locks at night, and it should. But the river the plant answers to bisects our community. Many of us walk alongside it. Everything we send it eventually surfaces.