To the Editor,
I was somewhat taken aback by Mayor Richardson’s comments after the council approval to divert $25,000 tentatively “set aside” as part of the initial $51,000 in funds required for the FIT application for the Waste To Energy incinerator project.
The mayor took a position that he wants a ruling and ( rate schedule if any ) on whether the province would approve the burning of garbage as qualified for the FIT program to “tell us if this is even an economically feasible project”.
It apparently doesn’t matter that “PEG” has been shown to be not what they claim, or that residents are massively opposed to both the concept and the proposers of the concept.
The Mayor has either clearly failed to listen to the public, or somehow wishes to stay on the fence and let the province “do the deciding” so that he does not face another recorded vote, as he did on November 14, 2011. You might recall that on that date, Deputy Mayor Greenfield was able to get three other councillors to vote with him in a recorded vote, and put a temporary halt to the rush toward signing a Memorandum of Understanding with “PEG” until there could be a public meeting to address residents’ concerns.
Those who voted AGAINST having a public meeting prior to entering into a Memorandum, were Mayor Richardson, and councillors Stephens and Young. The Mayor and those two councillors did NOT want the public to have input.
I have spoken with many residents in the past few days, and the consensus indicates that the Mayor’s current position with regard to the proposed garbage incinerator is not at all what residents expected from the head of council.
Last October 17, 2011, I sent an email to the Mayor and all councillors, asking why they had not conducted Due Diligence before agreeing to pursue further arrangements with “PEG”...I asked if they even knew what Due Diligence was. I also referred to the fiasco we had run into several years ago, when we bought an unknown, unproven “in-vessel” composter from an unknown, unproven vendor.
The Mayor responded to me the same day, as follows:
“Mr. Robertson,
Thank you for your email and your concern. I can assure you that both staff and council are doing due diligence with this project as we do for any other request.
With respect to your comments on the “in-vessel” composter that you say didn’t work, you are wrong. It did work and worked well. The problem occurred when Meaford was too successful in getting its residents to compost and it could not handle the amount we were putting in. We would have had to buy a unit with twice the capacity and were not able to afford it. Meaford was, in fact, a pioneer in composting not only in Canada but in North America.
Unfortunately, we were a victim of our own success.
We are not going into any venture without checking it very carefully. Meaford has a staff and council committed to fiscal responsibility for our taxpayers.
I hope this helps.
Francis
Francis Richardson, Mayor”
We all know there was absolutely NO “staff and council” due diligence with regard to “PEG”, except for that done by Deputy Mayor Greenfield, and thank goodness Harley did so.
The intense due diligence was done later, by MAGG, and it showed clearly what”staff and council” hadn’t considered.
(As a footnote to credibility, most of us remember well that when the in-vessel composter was in service, there was little resident composting being done [compared to now], and even with that small amount of input, the composter was an abysmal failure and had to be scrapped.)
Mike Robertson, Meaford
+ 42 + 5 
