The age of the Yukon Electrical Company Ltd.'s (YECL) water licences in the McIntyre Creek area of Whitehorse is likely the reason the Yukon Water Board has not issued an invoice for water licence fees to the company since 1999.

In interviews Friday afternoon and this morning, water board manager Judi White said the two licences held by YECL in the Fish Lake-McIntyre Creek area were taken out in the early 1980s. They were subject to a different numbering system than licences issued in more recent years.

'The two licences are not numbered the way we started numbering licences in later years,' White said.

One YECL licence is for power-generating plants one and two in the Fish Lake area, which came into effect in November of 1986.

The second licence pertains to a licence for McIntyre Creek in the Porter Creek greenbelt area, which is now the subject of public consultations.

The licence number for power generating stations one and two, according to documents obtained from the water board, is Y-HY85-02L.

YECL's second licence was issued Feb. 1, 1983 and is numbered Y2L3-2685.

Both licences were issued to the company under the name of Yukon Hydro.

'We do it through a database. I think perhaps one of the reasons this happened ... around about 1998 these two licences slipped off our database,' White said.

'There's been no interest in this file; that helped us to allow the file(s) to get screwed up.'

The annual fee for each licence, White added, is approximately $1,500 a year each.

Responsibilities for water licences, she noted, used to be under federal jurisdiction, and only became a territorial matter following devolution.

White said while the water board is in charge of issuing invoices and collecting money, it is not responsible for enforcing licence provisions.

'The money comes in, but we don't monitor it. I would expect compliance people would monitor whether the money goes in.

'We don't do enforcement. If it has to do with enforcement (people) have to talk to Government of Yukon (Department of) Environment.'

Dennis Senger, the spokesman for Yukon Environment, said this morning his department likely didn't look into the matter because it was not alerted.

'We can't respond if we're not alerted,' he said.

Government officials will be sitting down to work out a process to ensure similar mistakes are not made in the future, he added.

Doug Tenney, YECL's general manager, said this morning that his company will be paying the fees it was never charged.

'We obviously didn't know that we hadn't been billed. A licence fee of $1,500 is obviously not something that we would hide from,' he said.

'We're certainly not looking for a freebie,' he said.

YECL, he added, receives thousands of invoices a year so it is not unrealistic that the company wouldn't notice the two missing invoices from the Yukon Water Board.

Tenney said it's important to be aware that the YECL is not actively seeking to build a power-generating plant in the greenbelt area.

'There would be a whole bunch of things that would have to happen before we would consider that ... all we're saying is that we have a licence there,' he said.