At a special meeting of MRC Pontiac council on August 24, the majority of the time was spent discussing a resolution regarding the waste incinerator project that has received much public attention in recent months.
The MRC currently spends $1.7 million annually to truck its garbage roughly 200 km to the landfill in Lachute. For several years Warden Jane Toller has been promoting the idea of creating a large incinerator to handle the garbage of not only Pontiac, but the Outaouais, Renfrew County and the City of Ottawa as well. A former Toronto city council member for East York, Toller has repeatedly used the Durham-York Energy Centre as an example of what she would like to bring to the Litchfield industrial park, even taking a tour of the facility with several mayors and MRC officials.
The meeting began with a public question period, where Linda Davis, a former councillor with the Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton who ran against Toller for the Warden position in 2017, asked a series of questions regarding the proposed "Energy from Waste" project. The list of questions she sent to council is available here.
While Davis attempted to get a response directly from the supporting mayors at the table, Toller responded instead. The full audio from the public question period is available at the end of the article.
The resolution approved at the meeting is for council to set aside $100,000 from the MRC's accumulated surplus to mandate Deloitte to produce a business plan for the project. It also stipulates that the money be committed only after council has approved the proposal submitted by Deloitte. The MRC has already budgeted $20,000 for the EFW project.
Speaking after the meeting, Toller explained that any contracts above $121,000 must go to public tender, which is why they were able to single out a specific company. She said that they chose Deloitte because of the company's previous experience with similar projects.
The vote on the resolution wasn't unanimous, with representatives from six of the 18 municipalities (Clarendon, Chichester, Bristol, Otter Lake, Litchfield and Waltham) voting against.
Speaking after the meeting, Bristol Mayor Brent Orr explained that while he's not against the idea of an EFW facility, he wanted more information about the project, as well as any private investors that are involved.
Toller has said that her vision for the project would be a public/private partnership, meaning that it would mix investment from private investors as well as public institutions. While she has touted $180 million in commitment from private investors, she declined to name them, except for Derek McGrimmon of Renfrew, who she said had committed $50 million. McGrimmon owns several companies in Ontario and Quebec, including McGrimmon Cartage, which hauls waste and operates the transfer station in Clarendon.
Following the meeting, Toller spoke about why she's in favour of a "3P" set up.
The full audio of the special meeting's public question period is available below: