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Selective about outrage

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In Bradford West Gwillimbury
Jun 21st, 2010
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Letter to Bradford Times June 10 2010
To the editor: I was disappointed that Doug White did not vote with the majority of Simcoe County Councillors to revoke the Certificate of Approval for dumpsite 41. Mr. White likes to point out that the residents from Tiny, Tay, Midland and Penetang have been filling up other County landfills, but I would like to point out that Bradford has never owned a landfill site, as West Gwillimbury had a landfill that was taken over by the County in 1990, and it wasn’t until 1991 that Bradford and West Gwillimbury amalgamated.
There was a South Simcoe Waste Management Master Plan that ended in failure in 2001, after having spent $5 million to try and find a dumpsite. Instead of a municipality from South Simcoe proposing an alternative, the solution was to send the garbage from South Simcoe to other County landfills.
Dump Site 41 was rejected as a site in 1989 by a joint OMB and Environmental Review Board, but a political decision re-opened the discussions. The science supporting this Site 41 has never been peer reviewed and the County is taking the Information and Privacy Commissioner to a judicial review to keep from releasing information. The Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC) is in the business of knowing what information can be released, so for the County to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars fighting the IPC so taxpayers can’t see information they paid for is ludicrous. To spend millions of dollars on consultants and engineering reports to try and justify a dumpsite when common sense would indicate the wrong site was selected is the real waste of taxpayer money.
The County spent $250,000 in August 2009 on a public relations firm to improve the County’s image after their handling of Dump Site 41. Clearly Mayor White is selective in his outrage over waste of taxpayers’ money.
Robert Keffer, BWG

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