Flurry of comments stalls mega quarry progress

Thursday, July 28, 2011

by SUSAN MANN

It will be years before Ontario’s natural resources ministry can make a decision on the Highland Companies’ application to operate a massive quarry in Melancthon Township.

On its website, the ministry says in a July 28 update Highland’s application is in the very early stages of a rigorous review process under the Aggregate Resources Act and a decision on the application isn’t imminent. In addition, the proposed approximately 2,300-acre quarry will need approval under Ontario’s Planning Act, Environmental Protection Act and Water Resources Act. The proposal calls for about 2,000 acres of the site to be excavated with the rest being buffer zones. The depth of the quarry will be 1.5 times the depth of Niagara Falls.

Company officials must pore through and address each of the 2,051 objections submitted during the Act’s objection period that ended April 26. Highland has two years to resolve all of the objections raised. An additional 3,735 comments were received through an Environmental Registry posting which closed for submissions on July 11.

The ministry says it has received confirmation from Highland it intends to analyze and respond to the environmental registry postings as though they were also official objections filed under the Aggregate Resources Act. The company also intends to deal with them in the two-year time frame the Act provides for dealing with formal objections.

“Due to the nature of the application and the number of concerns raised during the process it will likely be some time before consideration will be given to the issuance or refusal of a license,” it says on the ministry’s website.

A ministry spokesperson says they don’t know yet what objections were raised because they’re still compiling a final list.

Organic beef farmer Carl Cosack, who’s vice chair of the North Dufferin County Agricultural and Community Taskforce, calls the number of responses extraordinary. People had only 45 days to respond to Highland’s massive 3,100-page application, he explains.

Cosack says he hasn’t heard anyone saying a good thing yet about the quarry proposal. Many of people’s concerns have to do with water, traffic and the blasting. But their overriding concern is water. Melancthon is the highest point in southern Ontario running water north, south, east and west.

Highland’s proposal calls for it to manage 600 million litres of water daily. Cosack says that’s the amount of water used by 2.7 million Ontarians every day.

“The Highland Companies wants to manage the fresh water supply of one quarter of  Ontario’s population,” he says, noting the company plans to gather the water, let it settle out for three days to settle out the contamination then pump it back into the waterways.
That means Highland would basically have under its management at any given point in time the water used by three-quarters of Ontario’s population. “This raises a lot of concerns in a lot of different areas,” he says.

Traffic is another big concern, Cosack says. In the application Highland says its wants to operate unlimited tonnage. The proposal calls for 150 loaded trucks per hour, 24 hours a day except statutory holidays, leaving the site. “That is just beyond comprehension,” he says, noting that’s 3,600 tractor-trailers headed south daily and the same number of empty ones returning leaving no room for other road users.

“There’s a tractor-trailer every 24 seconds entering a county road system,” he says.

Cosack notes there’s “truly nothing in this that makes sense for anyone except the shareholders of the company . . . This is just a wrong development period. The risk factors are so enormous.”

Highland spokesperson Lindsay Broadhead says the majority of the opposition letters weren’t from local communities but mostly from the Greater Toronto Area. “People are making decisions based on the information they’ve received so far and not wanting a quarry.” But there are benefits to the local economy including job creation and a financial boost to the area over many years.

The company is using social media, such as Twitter, and has launched a website to get its side of the story out.

Broadhead says all the aggregate produced from the Melancthon quarry will be used in southern Ontario. There are no plans to transport any aggregate to the Untied States or China.

Broadhead refers to a 2010 report called the State of Aggregate Resources in Ontario Study by the natural resources ministry that outlines the huge demand for aggregate in the province. Over the past 20 years, Ontario consumed an average of 154 million tonnes of aggregate per year. Over the next 20 years, the province will require an average of 186 million tonnes of aggregate per year.

In the greater Golden Horseshoe region aggregate demand is estimated at 100 million tonnes per year.

In addition, Ontario recently announced a $100 billion, 10-year infrastructure plan that can’t be met without new sources of aggregate, she says.

Aggregate is used in home, road, hospital plus subway and train line construction.

“I’m sympathetic to the people who are saying they don’t want it in their backyard,” Broadhead says but Highland selected Melancthon because it’s within 75 kilometres of an area identified as having the greatest need for aggregate. “In terms of cost/benefit to taxpayers it makes the most sense to have a quarry within that space,” she says.

Another reason Melancthon Township was picked was because Highland didn’t want to dig a quarry in the Greenbelt area, the Niagara Escarpment or the Oak Ridges Moraine. The company didn’t want to locate the quarry in any area deemed environmentally sensitive by the government, she explains.

There needs to be a fuller discussion about the quarry that takes into account the need for aggregate, the location and environmental protection of some areas but opening up others to digging rather than just the ‘not here’ point of view, she says.

About the idea of going through a possible environmental assessment, Broadhead says no quarry has ever gone through an environmental assessment. “There isn’t a procedure that links aggregate resources with an environmental assessment.”

In addition, for the quarry to be licensed, it has to go through a very similar environmental review processes as an environmental assessment, she says. BF