Wauchope to lead county waste committee

BY Bruce Hain Alliston Herald 
Innisfil’s deputy mayor has been elected by his peers at county council to chair an important committee.
Gord Wauchope will lead the County of Simcoe’s new Solid Waste Management Strategy Steering Committee in the aftermath of the Site 41 debacle earlier this year.
Local, provincial, national and even international pressure forced county council from proceeding with its plans to open a landfill site on what was deemed environmentally-sensitive lands in Tay Township.
“My role as chair is to keep us on track as to what (county) council wants,” says Wauchope. “We plan to have a recommendation to council by July (2010) that we can move ahead with a way to get rid of the waste, instead of the way we do it now.”
County Warden Tony Guergis said, “I drafted the motion creating the committee focused on solutions and including the public and our community partners in the process.”
The committee will be composed of five county councillors, five private citizens, including Mark Guthrie, John Nychuk, Nicholas Rowe, Gordon McKay and Mary Munnoch, one City of Barrie representative, one City of Orillia representative, a First Nations representative and a representative from the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.
“We’ve asked for representatives from both the federal and provincial governments,” Wauchope added. “We don’t want to push this onto the next council that gets elected in 2010.”
The committee will consider and incorporate the principles of zero waste in its review.
“We have a lot of dedicated people on this committee,” Wauchope said. “We have to roll up our sleeves and hopefully come up with a solution. Through our consultants, they will listen to all the proposals and suggestions from the public and the committee.
Site 41 was a very contentious issue – that’s why county council decided to form the committee.”
The first meeting of the committee has been tentatively set for Wednesday, Dec. 16 at 9 a.m. in the County Council chambers in Midhurst.
“It will be a lot of hard work and a lot of meetings,” Wauchope said. “I just hope we can come up with something.”