Garbage issues were front and centre at City Hall Tuesday, as Halifax council began dealing with a set of proposals put forward by CAO Richard Butts to fundamentally change how the landfill operates.
In the 1990s, Halifax opened the Otter Lake Landfill. To maintain the highest environmental standards, the landfill included a front end processor, where workers manually sort through the in-coming trash to take out recyclables, toxics and organics that were not properly sorted by residents. Additionally, the surrounding community was promised that the landfill would be closed by 2024.
Just as Halifax was creating its “world-class” waste system, Butts was an vice-president with Waste Management in Ontario. In 1998, the city of Toronto hired him to oversee the controversial plan to ship garbage to Michigan. He soon moved up in that city’s bureaucracy to become deputy city manager, but was part of the exodus of city managers who left after Rob Ford was elected mayor. Butts was hired as Halifax CAO in 2011, but he continues to live in Toronto, commuting to Halifax every Monday morning and flying back home every Friday afternoon. When he was hired, Halifax council directed him to cut costs wherever he could. Last year, he took aim at landfill operations.
There’s been an evolution in how Butts performs at council. At first, when he addressed council, he would stand respectfully, and behaved as a true public servant. Within a year, however, he stopped standing, and merely directed his staff. By six months ago he was noticeably bored at council meetings, and recently he’s been witnessed nodding asleep.
Tuesday, Butts took the unprecedented step of giving the 45-minute staff presentation on the proposed landfill changes himself. He wants nine specific changes, all with the end goal of closing the front end processor, and extending the life of the landfill, potentially to 2059. He says this will save the city up to $309 million between now and 2015. Critics say the financial savings are inflated, and the proposed changes violate the terms of the 1990s’ agreements, especially related to the life of the landfill.
Council was sympathetic to the first six of the nine proposals, all of which are designed to improve the rates of recyclable and organics diversion, and which were adopted without much debate. The most controversial of the six is a requirement that residents use clear plastic bags, with one smaller opaque bag allowed within each clear bag. Even though council has approved the proposal, the change to clear bags requires a change in a city bylaw, which in turn requires a public hearing, probably this summer. The actual requirement will be enforced six to nine months after that.
The remaining three proposals are very controversial. They include a change in policy to allow commercial waste haulers to ship garbage out of HRM, closing the front end processor and extending the size and lifetime of the landfill. Council will debate these proposals at future meetings.
This article appears in Jan 16-22, 2014.
He wants the money for a stadium
2059 is the tip of the iceberg; if in theory it took 25 years to fill the first nine waste storage cells at Otter Lake (it will probably take a year or two more actually) you arrive at 2024, then at 15 meters height effectively adding 23 years or more if all things stay the same, so now we are at 2047. But in the staff Final report it also alludes to adding another 9 new cells onto the existing nine, so 2047 + 25 + 23 = 2095. Now consider the fact that they want to eliminate the 50% of waste that now goes to the landfill that HRM says should be diverted and you have a landfill operation that is poised to be active a long way past 2100.
Is this to be the legacy of the broken promise to the people… promised a 25 year inconvenience and morph it into perhaps something that never closes in two or three lifetimes… if ever???
Scarey what a betrayal of trust can do to a community isn’t it?
Friends, Neighbours, Citizens, lend me your ears;
They come to bury garbage, not divert it
The things we dispose remain after us;
Our waste is oft interred in our landfill,
So leave Otter Lake Alone. The faulty Stantec report
Hath told you Otter Lake is expensive:
Yet it is not just burial, it is NOT a grievous fault,
For without it, grievously we would hath answered to it.
There, in Staff, with Butts and the rest;
For Butts, he is an expert;
So are they all, all waste management experts?
Come we to speak out against these changes.
This is our community, free from smells and vermin:
But Staff say it is too expensive;
And Staff are Waste Management Experts?
It hath protected the environment without fail for nearly 15 years,
Whose protections did, the environment’s coffers fill:
Does this in Otter Lake seem expensive?
When other communities cried NO, Otter Lake WE did accept:
Aye deceit, should we not have been made of sterner stuff?
Yet Butts says it’s too damn expensive;
And Butts he is a waste management, expert?
You all did speak at the Community Consultations,
We more than thrice yelled out “Honour the Contract”
More than thrice they refused to hear: is not our community worth it?
Yet Staff continues to say, it is too expensive;
And, sure, they are all waste management experts?
We spoke not to disprove what Staff spoke,
But here we were to speak what we know.
All HRM, nae, the world, did love Otter Lake once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to risk our community and environment?
Please Council! Flee not to brutish beasts,
Staff has lost their reason. Bear with the Contracts and Agreements;
Our hearts are in the landfill there at Otter Lake
And we must pause to form a CSC.
Butts needs a hearing aide but even then I doubt he’d listen. He has his own Agenda and does not accept the overweing results of the expensive Public Consultation held last Fall in HRM. He is arrogant and should stay in Toronto. They don’t want him there. We don’t want him here either.
It’s time for Council to get off their ‘butts’ and stop letting ‘the tail wagging the dog’. I hope they understand this message but I doubt it.
Not once have I seen a financial Plan that supports Mr. Butts claims of “too expensive or how much he can save”. You would think Council would ask for them before they approve anything. Maybe that’s too much to expect and time consuming for them. After all Council has already approved over $700,000. and it’s climbing, of taxpayers money to look into recommended improvements some of which are contained in the inaccurate Stantec Report, (likely audited by Butts before publication) while other ideas not called for in the request for information, have been added by Mr. Butts and his crew of pions. Where will it stop?
It’s time for all citizens of this wonderful Province, not just those in HRM, to take an interest to safeguard our future and the environment we control and are responsible for.
Instead of flying home for weekends perhaps this man could stay for one weekend and tour the communities that the HRM has made a deal with re: Otter Lake…he may discover that real people live in real communities…people who do care and will speak up and who are also footing the bill (no doubt) for his flights back and forth to the land of TO…talk about carbon footprints!
Butts is doing what he and council wants. Council is our democratic representation. What’s the problem? ; – )
During the public engagement process there was a vote taken that effectively stated that extending the operational term past 2024, or extending the the height of the waste storage cells or co-locating a campus at the Otter Lake facility were all NOT supported by the public. The public also said to honour the two legal agreement contracts which stated clearly that the Front End Processor, Waste Stabilization Facility, enhanced cell liner specification and the Community Monitoring Committee were to be actively in service throughout the operational term for the Otter Lake Facility. The votes did NOT give HRM Council a mandate to proceed with the majority of the recommendations put forward by HRM staff who effectively ignored the expressed will of the public throughout the review process thus far. A democracy works for and with the public and does not work against it when the ruling body does not have a mandate to do so. The written staff report minimizes the express views of the public while extolling the virtues of staff’s recommendations which are counter to the will of the people. This is not a good example of democracy in progress.
He flies back and forth every week!?!?! Who pays for that? Who pays his living expenses all week while he is ‘away from home’????
As a tax payer I am starting to think having full time $78,500 per year councillors makes no sense. Time to go back to part time councillors and $20,000 per year and end this joke. They hire consultants, can’t agree on anything, and some of them parade around like celebrities posting online social media pictures of themselves cutting ribbons, shaking hands, and kissing babies. 2016 is coming !!
“He says this will save the city up to $309 million between now and 2015″… that’s a one year period. Yet the 2013/2014 operation budget for all of HRM was $823 million. How does that make sense? The entire Waste Management budget for HRM in 2013/14 appears to be about $32 million (page 236 of this page: http://www.halifax.ca/budget/documents/Appr13-14OperBook06_19_13V3.pdf)
What a bunch of fucking bullshit. Even the USSR wasn’t this fucking crazy. Telling us what garbage bags to use, what light bulbs to use, what we can and can’t feed our kids at school, and now fucking doorknobs are on the list. This has got to stop NOW.
I reside in Ontario and what I find most alarming about this man is his exodus of Toronto after Rob Ford became elected.
“In 1998, the city of Toronto hired him to oversee the controversial plan to ship garbage to Michigan. He soon moved up in that city’s bureaucracy to become deputy city manager, but was part of the exodus of city managers who left after Rob Ford was elected mayor.”
It was at this point that the City of Toronto, under Mayor Ford, moved to privatize the garbage collection. That move is estimated to save 12 million dollars per year.
So what exactly did Richard Butts do for Toronto? Well, he oversaw the plan to ship their waste to Michigan at no cost savings. Then the hated Ford nation moved in and actually saved the city millions.
Why the hell did HRM hire this twit in the first place?
We need Rob Ford!!!
So city council debated about garbage bags. I suppose it’s easier than planning for the 3rd bridge, implementing public transit, widening Bayers Road, burying power cables, establishing a municipal power plant that doesn’t run on coal, ensuring there is parking downtown instead of destroying parking spaces, coaxing the city to move its downtown core away from a peninsula (San Diego moved its downtown almost a century ago), encouraging the use of smaller cars & trucks (like Kei format in Japan) and motorcycles (e.g. mopeds), or even having an effective snow removal strategy where people’s vehicles don’t get destroyed in their driveways, or replacing the useless amber street lights with ones that actually light crosswalks properly. But, I am grateful that they did not spend months debating chickens and eggs, or even worse, cat licensing. We must be grateful for the small things.