Lora MacEachern, the Deputy Minister of Environment and Climate Change, has denied the CMC its request for the establishment of a Technical Steering Committee. The refusal was contained in an Aug. 18, 2023 letter from the deputy minister, posted below. The letter came in response to an Aug. 04 request from CMC’s Chair, Linda MacKay. Her letter to the deputy minister is also on the Otter Lake Community Monitoring Committee’s website as well as the CMC’s facebook account. Provision for a Technical Steering Committee is contained in the department’s 2022 approval that allowed the HRM to change its operations at the Otter Lake Landfill. Under the approval, the HRM now trucks residential garbage directly to burial without prior on-site sorting at the landfill. It is important to note that there are no conditions, other than “the request of “the Administrator” – the departmental staffer assigned to administer the approval – listed in the document as a precondition to establishing a Technical Steering Committee. The committee would have put the CMC at the table with the HRM, the landfill owner and Mirror NS, the landfill operator, along with the regulatory agencies, to review the landfill’s operations and make recommendations for changes to the landfill’s annual monitoring program. Membership on the committee would have helped CMC be more proactive rather than reactive to developments at the landfill, thereby enabling the CMC to better serve the interests of the communities located near the garbage disposal facility, especially those within a five km. radius of the site. [ view /download ]
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