pontiac county

Mayors vote to abandon incinerator project

Local Journalism Initiative / / / , ,

Charles Dickson, LJI Reporter

A campaign waged for more than a year by Pontiac County warden Jane Toller to win support for her energy-from-waste (EFW) project appears to have come to an end.
In a vote held at the MRC building on Wednesday evening, all 18 of Pontiac county’s mayors supported a motion tabled by Litchfield mayor Colleen Larivière calling for the complete abandonment of the project.
The motion stipulated that all procedures and/or actions by the warden and by the MRC staff be ceased immediately in regards to the energy-from-waste incinerator project, and that no funds from the MRC Pontiac budget, or any type of grant or program money be allocated for any expenses, studies, communications, etc., relating to the project.
The Litchfield motion also provided that MRC’s waste management committee and staff responsible for waste management invest all their efforts into the preparation of a zero-waste policy for MRC Pontiac.
On this last point, Allumette Island mayor Corey Spence proposed a unanimously agreed change to the wording to the effect that the committee and staff focus their efforts “to aspire to zero waste as outlined in the objectives of the 2022-2030 PGMR [residual materials management plan], and to continue working with the three MRCs and the City of Gatineau to find the best regional solution for our residual waste.”
The requirement in the Litchfield motion that the energy-from-waste incinerator project be abandoned completely remained intact in the final resolution when it received unanimous support around the MRC table of mayors.
The move follows the May 6 decision by Litchfield’s municipal council to table a motion at the May 15 meeting of MRC Pontiac’s Council of Mayors to cease all expenditure and work related to the project.
The Litchfield resolution followed the emergence of considerable anti-incinerator sentiment expressed by the public at a series of five presentations on the subject convened by the MRC throughout the Pontiac in March and April, culminating in 16 of the county’s 18 municipal councils passing resolutions opposing the project.
In the public question period prior to the vote at Wednesday’s meeting, Jennifer Quaile, speaking on behalf of a citizens’ advocacy group, Friends of the Pontiac, reported that, as of May 12, the group’s anti-incinerator petition had received 3,255 signatures, of which 73 per cent (2,376) are residents of Pontiac County.
In a radio interview with Warden Toller following the meeting, CHIP FM reporter Caleb Nickerson asked the warden whether, in light of all the opposition to the project, she still considers Pontiac to be a willing host, whether for incineration or other technologies.
“You know, we never really had a chance to test how the whole population feels,” Toller responded.
“We have 14,700 people. Tonight, we heard about the petition. Kim [Lesage, director general of MRC Pontiac] did the math – 73 per cent from the Pontiac, and that was after eight months of getting names – that’s only 16 per cent of the population,” she said.
“I have always felt it’s very important to represent what the majority of people want. The majority, in my mind, is 51 per cent. I don’t know what 51 per cent of people want but, by the time we do find the best solution, I’ll make sure that 51 per cent support it.”

Toller said the resolutions passed by multiple municipal councils in opposition to the incinerator was due to pressure from citizen activists.
“The votes that took place in each municipal council is because they had people right at the meeting, and our mayors and councils have never experienced such political pressure, public pressure.”
Later in the CHIP interview, in response to Nickerson’s question as to why the Deloitte-Ramboll analysis was based on the 400,000-ton figure, which he described as “faulty information,” the warden said that she and Kari Richardson [environmental coordinator at MRC Pontiac] had augmented the number “so that it could be the largest amount of waste, bringing it as a resource, that could create 45 megawatts of electricity, that’s why.”
“It was not Ramboll or Deloitte that started with those numbers. We provided all the numbers to them, we did, based on all the potential partners we could think of. And actually, with Ottawa we were also including the ICI [industrial, commercial and institutional waste], so it wasn’t just the residential waste,” Warden Toller explained. Voir aussi la déclaration de la préfete, page 6.
Other issues
Other issues raised in the public question period included the 370 per cent increase in the valuation of properties in the municipality of Alleyn and Cawood. Angela Giroux from Danford Lake said her municipality is already paying increased shares to the MRC this year based on the evaluations for next year. “This needs to be a collaborative discussion between all the mayors to say ‘we cannot take this increase, because the numbers are ridiculous,’” she said. The warden assured her that the mayor and director general of the municipality are working on this and that she will do whatever she can.
A delegation of former employees of the abattoir in Shawville asked the warden whether the MRC, which has purchased the assets of the business, would hire them back. For more on this, please see the story: MRC buys abattoir assets https://www.theequity.ca/246158-2/

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Mayors agree to discuss opening plenary meeting to the public

Local Journalism Initiative / / / ,

<strong>Questions asked about incinerator project at<br>February meeting of MRC coun</strong>cil

Charles Dickson, LJI Reporter

All 18 mayors at last week’s meeting of Pontiac county council supported a motion to discuss the possibility of opening their monthly plenary session to the public.
The motion, brought forward by Shawville mayor Bill McCleary, proposed that “discussions of this issue be conducted over the next few weeks for a final vote at the next public sitting” of the council.
In its preamble, McCleary’s resolution made reference to an informal survey of MRC Pontiac mayors conducted by “local media”. The survey, conducted by THE EQUITY in November of last year, found an approximate three-way split among the 18 mayors on the question of public attendance at the monthly plenary, with five mayors supportive, five opposed, six undecided, one open to a discussion on the matter and another undeclared (Public access to plenary discussions? THE EQUITY, Nov. 15, 2023).
Important to both supportive and undecided mayors alike was the need to retain the option to hold a portion of the meeting in-camera for discussion of such issues as human resources, proprietary matters relating to contracts, and security questions.

Garbage incinerator

Judy Spence, spokesperson for local advocacy group Citizens of the Pontiac, asked whether any of the mayors might put forward a motion to put the incinerator matter on hold “so that there can be more reflection on what options are out there, and basically hearing from the public.”
“There are so many waste management options other than burning,” Spence said, a point which Warden Toller quickly picked up on, saying, “We’re actually working in the CPO, which is the five regions of the Outaouais, on a garbage solution, because we’re all in the same boat. We’re all starting our recycling and our composting, but we’re all concerned about the residual waste which is currently going to landfill. Will it continue to go to landfill?”

As the discussion continued, the audio recording was intermittent, though it seems there was a exchange over how much of the MRC’s $1.7 million in costs associated with disposing of our 5,000 tons of garbage in landfill could be saved by removing wastes through recycling and composting.
Christine Anderson of the citizens’ group Friends of the Pontiac asked when the business plan being developed by Deloitte and Ramboll will be made public.

“The initial plan which is in draft form right now, is going to be presented to a working session of the mayors on Feb. 27 – we will be voting on it in the month of March,” responded Warden Toller.
“The next step that’s being proposed, or suggested by the consultants, would be to do a more extensive business plan which would answer many questions that still are not answered,” said the warden. She added that she expects other municipalities would help cover the costs. “We think that this plan, which would depend on waste coming from other municipalities as well, that they should put some funds into it.“
Anderson also asked about the protocol of sharing key points from the draft business plan with Renfrew County mayors before the Pontiac mayors had seen it.

As reported in THE EQUITY’s report on the warden’s presentation to Renfrew County Council (Warden Toller pitches Pontiac incinerator to Renfrew County, THE EQUITY, Feb. 14, 2024), the warden introduced what she referred to as “an initial business plan” and what she called “key findings.”

Incinerator questions at MRC meeting

In her presentation to Renfrew County Mayors in late January, Warden Toller said, “MRC Pontiac has completed an initial business plan with Deloitte and Ramboll from Denmark evaluating various technologies, looking at business models, partnerships, quantifying tonnages, travel distances, tipping fees, price of electricity production and funding. The results are in draft form and will be shared when finalized. Key findings: excellent and clean technologies are available; 25/75 private-public partnership is the best option; a 300-ton facility could suffice (with new tonnage information), DBOM, as Deloitte calls it, is the best plan, where we have a company, for example, Covanta, design, build, operate and maintain; . . . the last finding: it is very competitive with the current tipping fees that are being paid for landfill, and the distances are all reasonable for all of these regions coming to the Pontiac, the Pontiac is in the centre.”

At last Wednesday evening’s meeting, in response to Anderson’s question about sharing the draft report with Renfrew County mayors, Toller said that she didn’t know at the time that she was being recorded.
“I watched myself too, just to see what it is that I had said, because I didn’t know I was being recorded [on video] . . . and I was kind of relieved that I said only what I said.” Toller said that when she made the presentation, she hadn’t yet seen the business plan and described what she called “key findings” as points she had been including in her presentations since last summer.

“When we received the draft business plan, I had not looked at the draft business plan, and I certainly had not looked at the presentation that they had given us. I looked at that after I had been to Renfrew. So, my key findings were simply things I had already discussed with the mayors, and many of those things I had already discussed publicly, such as mass combustion is the best technology, out of the choice of pyrolysis and gasification. Another key finding that the distances all made sense. So, I wasn’t revealing anything confidential from our business plan. And when you see the business plan, which will be made public, you will see that it is very different from what I gave. My presentation was the exact presentation from July, and was my sort of ‘set’ presentation,” she said.

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