Five years in the making, a new water treatment plant outside Ohsweken held its grand opening Friday.

Despite the celebratory mood, the thoughts of many were on the vast majority of Six Nations residents who still don’t have access to clean drinking water.

“Around the world we’re seen as this wonderful Shangri-La that has a lot of stuff, and then all of a sudden we have to say that some of our neighbours don’t actually have drinkable water. That is obscene,” Brant MPP Dave Levac tells CTV News.

The new plant will service nine per cent of Six Nations residents, primarily in the built-up subdivisions of Ohsweken.

The other 91 per cent of Six Nations residents either truck their water in from the treatment plant or maintain private wells – although many wells are contaminated and considered unsafe.

Six Nations Chief Anita Hill says band officials are working to expand the water network.

“It’s a priority. We have to get our proposals together. We’re going to hit every (infrastructure) fund we can,” she says.

Keith Lickers lives in Ohsweken and will receive water pumped to his house via the new plant.

A former member of the reserve’s water board, he says he’s impressed with what he saw while touring the plant Friday.

“I would feel pretty safe in being able to take water from a tap and drink it,” he says.

“I wasn’t that sure about the quality of the water with the previous treatment plants.”

The new treatment plant cost $41 million, $26 million of which was provided by the federal government.

Hill says she thinks the federal government – which is mandated to fund reserves – should have paid for the entire project, but says getting the facility built was too important to continue delaying by arguing over its cost.

“We couldn’t stay with that old water lagoon system … being held together by duct tape,” she says.

“I thought they should have come up with the whole amount, but we needed to get it done.”

A study conducted by the federal government in 2011 found that 75 per cent of water systems on reserves pose a high or medium risk to human health.