Heated special MRC meeting on incinerator newsletter, resolution voted down 16-1
Heated special MRC meeting on incinerator newsletter, resolution voted down 16-1
Around two dozen members of the public attended a special meeting of the MRC Pontiac council of mayors Monday morning (April 29) at the MRC office in Campbell’s Bay. The special sitting had been called by Warden Jane Toller for the purposes of appropriating $3,000 for the distribution of a newsletter on a proposed waste incinerator project to mailboxes across the region. The money would be appropriated from Toller’s travel budget.
The resolution was overwhelmingly rejected 16 votes to 1, with only Portage-du-Fort Mayor Lynne Cameron voting in favour. No representatives of the Municipality of Thorne were present at the meeting and L’Isle-aux-Allumettes was represented by pro-mayor Ivan Schryer.
The public question period, which lasted around 40 minutes, was heated at times with citizens voicing their strong opposition to the project and asking that the council halt any further spending on the proposal. Toller even asked one woman to leave the meeting, saying that she was being disruptive, but the woman refused. The full recording of the meeting is available here.
Several mayors articulated their reasoning for opposing the motion, including Otter Lake Mayor Terry Lafleur, who questioned whether the goal of the newsletter was truly to inform the public, or to try and win more support for a project the warden has championed. He also questioned the propriety of using money that was budgeted for travel on something completely different.
Speaking after the meeting, Litchfield Mayor Colleen Larivière said that the response to the project that she has heard has been overwhelmingly opposed. The Litchfield industrial site has been floated as the location of a potential incineration site, though the municipality opposes it.
L’Isle-aux-Allumettes pro-mayor Ivan Schryer questioned the impartiality of the draft newsletter, saying that it didn’t present the potential downsides or environmental impacts of an incinerator project.
Speaking after the meeting, Toller initially declined to conduct a recorded interview, saying she “didn’t trust” CHIP 101.9 due to a previous interview on the subject with which she took issue.
After spending roughly $120,000 on an initial business case from the company Deloitte, the MRC held a series of town halls to discuss the issue in a public setting. They also published the documents to their website earlier this month, but quickly took them down after being informed that they didn’t have permission from the contractors to publish the documents (CHIP 101.9 saved PDF versions, which are available here.) She said that they would be publishing a summary of the Deloitte business case on the MRC’s website, however, since it’s in English only, it would need to be translated. No firm timeline was given on when the summary would be made available. Despite these communications efforts, Toller worried that “the public will never receive the information.”
