Citizens flock to recycling plant meeting

By NATHAN TAYLOR ORILLIA PACKET AND TIMES July 21 2010
About 80 people packed into the Oro Town Hall Tuesday evening for a meeting regarding a proposed recycling facility on a site on the Oro Moraine.
A group of citizens opposed to Oro-Medonte Township’s plan to put a construction-material recycling plant on Line 7, near Old Barrie Road, organized the meeting, which featured a number of speakers, including Steve Ogden.

Ogden, who fought for years against putting a dump at Site 41 in Tiny Township, said Tuesday’s meeting was the “first step” toward a solution.
“This is called a sense of community,” he said, noting the same could be said of the beginnings of the Site 41 opposition, which grow over the years and successfully blocked the project.
Much of Ogden’s talk focused on his experiences fighting Site 41, and his frustrations over dealing with the Ministry of the Environment and what he referred to as ineffective elected officials.
“Site 41 allowed other towns to stand up,” he said, encouraging the group at Oro Town Hall to do the same. “You should fight it, because it’s your water. It’s your children’s water.”
Oro-Medonte Deputy Mayor Ralph Hough took Ogden to task, saying he took “great personal offence” to Ogden’s “generalization of county council.”
Mayor Harry Hughes also criticized Ogden’s remarks.
“As Deputy Mayor Hough said, the people of Oro-Medonte elected representatives who went to county council and consistently voted against Site 41,” Hughes said. “The reason that county council voted against Site 41 was because we listened to the information.”
That information was that if recycling is increased, there wouldn’t be the need to increase landfills. Hence, the TRY Recycling project.
Without increased recycling, the current landfill — which Hughes noted is also on a sensitive area of the Oro Moraine — would be closed in seven years.
Ogden said he had little information on the Oro-Medonte TRY Recycling project.
“I have no knowledge of who it is, what it is. I don’t know have that information,” he said.