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Residents of Aylmer’s Cook Road are living a deja vu they can’t shake off.
After years of battle, those residents thought they had won the closing of the Cook Road landfill. By 1991 it was clear that the dump had polluted the wells of the area, and its run-off and leachate were contaminating nearby Beamish Lake, which flows into the Ottawa River.
The site was sealed, groundwater pumped out and filtered, and biogas burned off. While nothing had actually been cleaned up, this big sore had at least been stabilized and was unlikely to get worse. Even Beamish Lake seemed to be on the mend.
In the new millennium Quebec turned its attention to landfills.
Municipalities were ordered to reduce their landfill-destined waste by 65 per cent by 2008, including a major cut in organic wastes. Each city and regional government was to build composting facilities. The plan won praise across the province from environmentalists and from politicians who were watching their dumps approach capacity.
Little did everyone know, especially folks on Cook Road, that the plan had details only the devil would appreciate.
Who would pay? Where would the recycling and composting take place? Which neighbourhoods would get the heavy truck traffic? “Details,” sniffed the planners.
Despite that, everyone seemed pleased to see an end to ever-expanding landfills.
So eventually Gatineau officials sat down to plan the new composting facility. The city put the project up for tender and at the same time, apparently, officials looked at sites available for the facility. Two companies bid. One, Conporec, was disqualified because it did not respect the city’s timelines. That left GSI Environment’s bid.
GSI is a large company with composting sites across Quebec and the United States. GSI already operates a composting facility just outside Gatineau in the municipality of L’Ange-Gardien. But GSI’s bid came in above the city’s cost projections and it was rejected. Gatineau then cancelled the tender and awarded the contract to a local non-profit company no one had heard much of, La Ressourcerie.
La Ressourcerie says it is part of an international network of waste-management co-operatives. It has quietly operated a yard-waste composting project on the Cook Road site. Here leaves and other trimmings are pushed into long rows on bare earth and turned periodically.
City officials have also decided that the Cook Road site would be an ideal location for the larger composting facility.
It has sewers, water, and a leachate collection system. Voila! History rises from the dead dump, and citizen anger goes into overdrive. Three public meetings see large numbers of protesters; the police are called, one meeting is suspended twice to allow tempers to cool. The city stands firm: Composting goes to La Ressourcerie, and it goes on the Cook Road site.
Further adding to the chaos, La Ressourcerie’s chairman now says he wants a new site. That came just as the chair of the city’s environment commission ruled out a new study on composting. The mayor and city council agreed, but then, in an apparent attempt at appeasement, the mayor said he would listen to any suggestions for new locations that would be brought forward. One promoter piped up with the brainstorm of using part of Boucher Forest, the only wild area left inside Gatineau city limits.
Citizens were also told they will receive more information on why composting is a good thing and why doing it on the Cook Road site is an even better thing. Of course, all this still depends on Cook Road passing an environmental assessment and being rezoned to allow composting. Most people would have thought these last two would have been the first steps in the whole adventure.
But not Gatineau’s city government. Now Mayor Marc Bureau’s administration is facing “a war,” as one irate resident put it. Citizens are talking to lawyers. GSI Environment is threatening a lawsuit.
How’s that for city planning? How’s that for communicating with the population? How’s that for killing a good idea?
Fred Ryan is the publisher of the Aylmer Bulletin, the West Quebec Post and the Pontiac Journal.© The Ottawa Citizen 2006