The Rural Voice, 1994-11, Page 19moved, in September, to explore
sharing existing sites rather than
build a new, central site. Sharing
sites, said Barry Randall, co-
ordinator of the waste management
study for the county, could delay the
need for a new site for 15-20 years. A
series of public meetings was to be
held in late October to gauge public
feelings about the changes needed in
the operation of the sites to make it
possible to meet the 20 year goal.
There would have to be extra
compaction of garbage at the sites
and the county would have to meet
its target of 50 per cent waste
diversion by the year 2000. There
will have to be incentives to make
people make that kind of waste
reduction, Randall says. Tipping fees
of $40-$60 a tonne would likely be
charged to commercial users while a
residential users might face a $1 -a -
bag fee. The goal is to take waste
management out of the tax base and
make it a user -pay system. "It means
looking at the landfill site as a
commodity. Looking at the
replacement cost, it's probably the
most expensive commodity a
municipality owns."
n Perth, some municipalities,
namely Blanchard and Downie,
are nearing a serious need to find
alternatives and they have asked
the county to explore the idea of a
county landfill. On the other hand,
North Easthope, South Easthope,
Mornington and the town of
Milverton, went together in 1984 in a
joint search _for a new landfill for
their 10,000 population area. They
became the first Ontario municipality
to win approval for a landfill site
under the new Waste Management
Masterplan system.
That system, with its complicated
rules for selecting a site dictated by
the provincial Ministry of the
Environment and Energy, is the brunt
of much of the frustration among
politicians and rural landowners
alike. First of all there is the cost of
the studies required to choose a site.
Huron has already spent six years
and the earliest the new landfill could
be in operation — should one of the
current candidate sites prove suitable
and if there is no environmental
hearing, two large "ifs" — would be
the end of 1998, says Craig Metzger,
project co-ordinator for the Huron
Waste Management Masterplan
study. If those "ifs" are met, the cost
will be somewhere between $3 and
$5 million before the first load of
garbage is tipped.
The other source of frustration is
the site selection process. Potential
sites aren't so much selected by what
is there as by what isn't there. To
meet the requirements of the
Environmental Assessment Act, the
selection process has to exclude
certain areas. For instance, because
of the possibility of a landfill site
attracting seagulls, all areas within
eight kilometers of a federally
regulated airport are ruled out. A
buffer of two kilometers is mapped
around built up areas. Rural schools
and other institutions not in urban
areas have a buffer of one to two
kilometers. All provincially or
regionally significant wetlands are
prohibited from consideration as are
Areas of Natural and Scientific
Interest (ANSI). Even power
corridors and gas pipelines and
existing and potential gravel pits are
excluded.
All the areas that can't be used are
laid out on overlapping acetate maps.
The areas that aren't excluded,
provided they are large enough to
meet the needs set out in the
masterplan study, then become
candidate sites. It becomes a kind of
elaborate (and very expensive) game
of Blind Man's Bluff as the
municipality asks "Am I getting
close?" and consultants say, "You're
getting warm" or "You're getting
cold".
It's hard to imagine Eric Moore's
Benmiller-area pasture field as a
future site for a landfill to take all the
garbage from Huron County. In a
county where vast areas are flat and
unexciting visually, the view from
his hill -top is breath -taking. To the
west you can see all the way to Lake
Huron. To the north and east, you
can see across the Maitland River
valley to Auburn and beyond. The
flat plains to the north, east and south
erupt in this area in steeply rolling
hills making it one of the most scenic
areas of the county. A couple of
miles away people pay top dollar to
stay in the luxurious Benmiller Inn to
enjoy the beauty farmers here take
for granted.
But these hills have become a
problem for Eric Moore and
others in the northern part of
the county. One of the most
controversial parts of the constraint
system is the protection of top -class
farmland. The first round of
candidate -site selection in Huron
excluded land classes one through
four. Many of the six selected sites
proved to be swampy or with too
little depth of soil coverage over the
bedrock. Those that weren't were
found to have been incorrectly
mapped under the Canada Land
Inventory mapping and were
disqualified because they were not
class five, six or seven farmland.
In round two of site selection, the
county was allowed to relax the
constraint on farmland and allow use
of class three and four farmland.
But the classifications are set not
on.the actual quality of the soil but
on the capability of the land to grow
a wide range of crops. The difference
between class one and two and class
three or four may be only the amount
of slope in the land. So Eric Moore's
land has become eligible for a
landfill site because it is rolling
instead of flat. "I can grow any crops
I want, pretty well," he maintains.
It's an irony that by having to
choose class three and four land,
Huron is looking at sites that are
almost all near rivers that run
through the valleys between those
rolling hills. Moore's farm is high
above the Maitland which (lows into
Lake Huron at Goderich. While a
landfill site built there would be as
safe as could possibly be made, any
failure could result in leachate from
the site contaminating the river which
empties into Lake Huron a few
hundred feet from the water intake
for the water treatment plant of the
largest urban area in the county.
While environmental safety is
supposed to be primary, the Ontario
Ministry of Agriculture, Food and
Rural Affairs' battle to save the best
farmland also means that sites that
might be the safest but are located on
class one and two farmland won't be
considered unless all other potential
sites are excluded.
While many farmers supported
not losing the best farmland for a
landfill when the process began,
many others are changing their views
NOVEMBER 1994 15