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City council has voted to authorize staff to buy a landfill site in Ottawa’s rural southeast, though the purchase price will remain secret until the deal is done.
The 192-hectare Capital Region Resource Recovery Centre is located on Boundary Road near the 417, just south of the Amazon warehouse. In November, the city announced that it was in talks to buy the property from Taggart Miller Environmental Services Inc.
The vote was taken Wednesday following a closed-door council meeting, passing with 20 in favour and five opposed. The no votes were all from councillors with rural areas in their wards.
The decision allows senior city staff to negotiate, enter into and finalize an agreement to buy the landfill site.
“Obviously there are details to be worked out, and we can’t say with 100 per cent certainty that the transaction will be completed, but staff has the authority to negotiate a final agreement now,” said Mayor Mark Sutcliffe following Wednesday’s vote.
Rural-urban split
Osgoode Coun. Isabelle Skalski, whose ward includes the site, said she voted against the purchase largely because she didn’t think the process was fair to residents.
The city signed a non-disclosure agreement to protect the competitive bidding process, which has prevented it from revealing the price or conditions of the sale. Wednesday’s vote approves the budget to fund the purchase, but doesn’t reveal the cost. That information won’t be released until the sale is final.
Skalski said she wasn’t surprised to see only rural councillors join her in voting no.
“Urban and suburban councillors don’t have to worry about landfills being part of their backyards,” she said.
City staff have called the purchase a rare opportunity to buy a permitted landfill site as Ottawa’s current municipal dump on Trail Road fills up.
That landfill was set to run out of space in 2034 or 2035, though recent policy changes like the three-bag collection limit have extended that timeline by about six years. Provincial approval to expand Trail Road could add 15 more.
The proposed purchase of the Taggart Miller site attracted strong opposition, especially from residents of the nearby community of Carlsbad Springs, who warned that building a dump on the site will bring noisy truck traffic, unwelcome smells and contamination. They argued that property sits on unstable clay that makes it unsuitable for a landfill.
“I think that’s a very heavy risk to ask a community to wear,” Skalski said.
The site’s environment ministry approval requires traffic studies, an odour abatement plan and leachate treatment plan to mitigate some of those issues.
‘Very muddy’ process
Sutcliffe argued that the Taggart Miller site is going to be a landfill whether the city buys it or not. If Ottawa doesn’t take it, he says, the city will have no power to stop another municipality or private operator from dumping garbage there.
Lucie Régimbald, who has been active in the resident campaign against the proposed dump, said that argument does temper some of her frustration over a potential landfill in her community.
But she said the non-disclosure agreement and the closed-door meeting makes the process “very muddy.”
“It’s very frustrating,” she said. “How are you supposed to put forward the concerns of the residents if you don’t know what they’re talking about?”
No timeline for functional landfill
At the same time, Sutcliffe said Wednesday that the purchase doesn’t lock the city into a “long-term waste management solution.”
City staff have been studying options like an incinerator or building a new landfill, both of which are expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The purchase of the Taggart Miller site will be funded by debt and is expected to lead to a short-term hike in garbage fees that appear on property tax bills, though staff say the costs will balance out in the long-run.
The 2017 ministry approval for the site comes with conditions, including a 10-year deadline to begin construction on the site and a requirement to build waste diversion facilities before accepting waste.
But Alain Gonthier, the city’s general manager of public works, said that will not be an impediment going forward.
“From our discussion with the ministry and our review of due diligence of the approvals there is no timeline for when we have to start the actual construction or the operation of the site,” he said. “Whatever conditions were there have already been met.”
Gonthier said he is not yet in a position to give a timeline for when the city would be able to develop the site into a functional landfill.
The Taggart Miller waste facility (boundaries shown in red) is proposed for a site located in rural, eastern Ottawa, south of Highway 417 at the Boundary Road exit. (Taggart Miller Environmental Services)