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City calls emergency meeting to talk trash
Details vague on endorsed contract
Back-up plan needed for border closures
Sep. 19, 2006. 06:08 AM
PAUL MOLONEY AND VANESSA LU
CITY HALL BUREAU
TORONTO STAR
Toronto council is holding an emergency meeting today on a contingency plan to handle the city's garbage and sewage sludge in the event of a border closure.
But details of the contract recommended for approval are being kept under wraps at the closed-door meeting.
Due to growing opposition to shipping waste to Michigan, the city issued a request for proposals earlier this year to find sites that could handle its trash.
This month, a deal signed with the province effectively closed Michigan to waste from Ontario municipalities beginning in 2010.
Forty-three companies were invited to bid, but three bids were submitted.
While city staff initially recommended St. Thomas Sanitary Collective Service Limited Partnership, which operates the Green Lane Landfill near London, to take garbage and sewage sludge, works committee chair Shelley Carroll said the city is now looking at other details not part of the bidding process.
Carroll said the new scenario wasn't available in time to be discussed at last week's works committee meeting, and will be presented at today's special council meeting. "The details weren't there yet, but the details are there now, and as soon as we had the details, we called this meeting."
Carroll described the situation as a "further development" for council to consider even though it wasn't part of the bidding. "If there's something better than that, and council hasn't made its determination, hasn't signed a contract, and staff has different information, you have to bring it."
The tab is going to be much higher than is paid to ship garbage to Carleton Farms in Michigan. In 2007, Toronto will be paying $63 a tonne to truck and dump garbage in Michigan.
While there has been much speculation Toronto would go with Green Lane Landfill, its bid was very expensive at $88.18 a tonne for trucking and disposal and involves taking in 2007 only 30,000 tonnes of the more than 700,000 tonnes Torontonians will produce next year.
However, the city is not in a strong bargaining position with constant pressure to close the Michigan border to Toronto's trash, and no Ontario landfills that can take all the city's garbage.
Most councillors only learned of the meeting yesterday, and details of the contingency plan, including a confidential 12-page report, only circulated late yesterday. Much of today's debate is expected to happen behind closed doors.
Some councillors are upset about the special meeting because two community council meetings — North York and Toronto and East York — scheduled for this morning have been cancelled. Etobicoke and York community council will go ahead at 3 p.m. today.
A secret plan to stash the trash
JOHN BARBER
Globe and Mail
Councillor Karen Stintz picked up the slim document with the purple cover -- a secret report revealing the magic solution to all of Toronto's garbage woes, set to be debated in secret at a hastily convened special meeting of Toronto Council today -- and cocked a comely brow.
"This is our long-term strategy?" she asked, hefting the featherweight report, still unread, that landed on her desk late yesterday afternoon. "Okay. I'm not feeling confident."
But others are. While declining to discuss the contents of the report, works committee chair Shelley Carroll touted it as a potential breakthrough in the city's struggle to find an alternative to shipping almost a million tonnes of municipal waste to Michigan every year.
Still, confusion swirled yesterday with the distribution of another report in which senior officials recommended that the city enter into contracts worth as much as $24-million to divert garbage to a London-area landfill, instead of Michigan, between now and 2010. The recommendations capped a summer-long search for alternative disposal sites, which was made pressing this month when the province announced a deal to stop shipping municipal waste across the international border by that date.
As soon as that report was released, however, Ms. Carroll said that city staff are in fact recommending a last-minute, secret alternative. "It's something that has just unfolded in recent days," she said. "It has to be kept in camera because it's delicate."
As chair of the works committee, Ms. Carroll is a leading ally of Mayor David Miller. Although Mr. Miller declined comment on the secret plan, Ms. Carroll's support of it strongly suggests it will gain provisional approval at today's meeting.
Whatever it may be, the secret alternative is superior to the arrangement recommended in public by senior staff, according to Ms. Carroll. After reviewing 43 proposals to supply "contingency disposal capacity" in case the border is closed to waste between now and 2010, they recommended that council make a deal with the owners of the Green Lane landfill, just west of London next to Highway 401. But the cost of landfilling in Ontario, as quoted by Green Lane, will be $90 a tonne, compared with the $60 a tonne it costs to do the same in Michigan.
Scuttling the results of its official Request for Proposals in favour of an unanticipated last-minute alternative will not expose the city to legal liability, according to Ms. Carroll. "It's all being done according to the rules," she said.
One reason that details of the proposal are being kept secret could be that it involves a real-estate transaction, one of the few matters (along with personnel issues) council is allowed to discuss in private. That suggests council could be looking to solve its problems by acquiring an existing Ontario landfill operation.
If feasible, that would be the ideal solution to the city's never-ending garbage crisis -- one that arose initially after local pressure forced the premature decommissioning of the city's profitable Keele Valley landfill in Vaughan. Profits from the operation of that landfill reduced the cost of disposing city waste to zero and helped forestall massive tax increases when welfare costs exploded in the recession of the early 1990s.
But a return to such halcyon days remains highly unlikely, despite the current excitement among those in the know at city hall. As the high cost of going to Green Lane demonstrates, Ontario (unlike Michigan) suffers from an acute shortage of landfills approved to accept municipal waste.
jbarber@globeandmail.com
Details vague on endorsed contract
Back-up plan needed for border closures
Sep. 19, 2006. 06:08 AM
PAUL MOLONEY AND VANESSA LU
CITY HALL BUREAU
TORONTO STAR
Toronto council is holding an emergency meeting today on a contingency plan to handle the city's garbage and sewage sludge in the event of a border closure.
But details of the contract recommended for approval are being kept under wraps at the closed-door meeting.
Due to growing opposition to shipping waste to Michigan, the city issued a request for proposals earlier this year to find sites that could handle its trash.
This month, a deal signed with the province effectively closed Michigan to waste from Ontario municipalities beginning in 2010.
Forty-three companies were invited to bid, but three bids were submitted.
While city staff initially recommended St. Thomas Sanitary Collective Service Limited Partnership, which operates the Green Lane Landfill near London, to take garbage and sewage sludge, works committee chair Shelley Carroll said the city is now looking at other details not part of the bidding process.
Carroll said the new scenario wasn't available in time to be discussed at last week's works committee meeting, and will be presented at today's special council meeting. "The details weren't there yet, but the details are there now, and as soon as we had the details, we called this meeting."
Carroll described the situation as a "further development" for council to consider even though it wasn't part of the bidding. "If there's something better than that, and council hasn't made its determination, hasn't signed a contract, and staff has different information, you have to bring it."
The tab is going to be much higher than is paid to ship garbage to Carleton Farms in Michigan. In 2007, Toronto will be paying $63 a tonne to truck and dump garbage in Michigan.
While there has been much speculation Toronto would go with Green Lane Landfill, its bid was very expensive at $88.18 a tonne for trucking and disposal and involves taking in 2007 only 30,000 tonnes of the more than 700,000 tonnes Torontonians will produce next year.
However, the city is not in a strong bargaining position with constant pressure to close the Michigan border to Toronto's trash, and no Ontario landfills that can take all the city's garbage.
Most councillors only learned of the meeting yesterday, and details of the contingency plan, including a confidential 12-page report, only circulated late yesterday. Much of today's debate is expected to happen behind closed doors.
Some councillors are upset about the special meeting because two community council meetings — North York and Toronto and East York — scheduled for this morning have been cancelled. Etobicoke and York community council will go ahead at 3 p.m. today.
A secret plan to stash the trash
JOHN BARBER
Globe and Mail
Councillor Karen Stintz picked up the slim document with the purple cover -- a secret report revealing the magic solution to all of Toronto's garbage woes, set to be debated in secret at a hastily convened special meeting of Toronto Council today -- and cocked a comely brow.
"This is our long-term strategy?" she asked, hefting the featherweight report, still unread, that landed on her desk late yesterday afternoon. "Okay. I'm not feeling confident."
But others are. While declining to discuss the contents of the report, works committee chair Shelley Carroll touted it as a potential breakthrough in the city's struggle to find an alternative to shipping almost a million tonnes of municipal waste to Michigan every year.
Still, confusion swirled yesterday with the distribution of another report in which senior officials recommended that the city enter into contracts worth as much as $24-million to divert garbage to a London-area landfill, instead of Michigan, between now and 2010. The recommendations capped a summer-long search for alternative disposal sites, which was made pressing this month when the province announced a deal to stop shipping municipal waste across the international border by that date.
As soon as that report was released, however, Ms. Carroll said that city staff are in fact recommending a last-minute, secret alternative. "It's something that has just unfolded in recent days," she said. "It has to be kept in camera because it's delicate."
As chair of the works committee, Ms. Carroll is a leading ally of Mayor David Miller. Although Mr. Miller declined comment on the secret plan, Ms. Carroll's support of it strongly suggests it will gain provisional approval at today's meeting.
Whatever it may be, the secret alternative is superior to the arrangement recommended in public by senior staff, according to Ms. Carroll. After reviewing 43 proposals to supply "contingency disposal capacity" in case the border is closed to waste between now and 2010, they recommended that council make a deal with the owners of the Green Lane landfill, just west of London next to Highway 401. But the cost of landfilling in Ontario, as quoted by Green Lane, will be $90 a tonne, compared with the $60 a tonne it costs to do the same in Michigan.
Scuttling the results of its official Request for Proposals in favour of an unanticipated last-minute alternative will not expose the city to legal liability, according to Ms. Carroll. "It's all being done according to the rules," she said.
One reason that details of the proposal are being kept secret could be that it involves a real-estate transaction, one of the few matters (along with personnel issues) council is allowed to discuss in private. That suggests council could be looking to solve its problems by acquiring an existing Ontario landfill operation.
If feasible, that would be the ideal solution to the city's never-ending garbage crisis -- one that arose initially after local pressure forced the premature decommissioning of the city's profitable Keele Valley landfill in Vaughan. Profits from the operation of that landfill reduced the cost of disposing city waste to zero and helped forestall massive tax increases when welfare costs exploded in the recession of the early 1990s.
But a return to such halcyon days remains highly unlikely, despite the current excitement among those in the know at city hall. As the high cost of going to Green Lane demonstrates, Ontario (unlike Michigan) suffers from an acute shortage of landfills approved to accept municipal waste.
jbarber@globeandmail.com