MONO COUNCIL BADLY NEEDS to rethink its current approach to solid waste disposal.

As matters stand, the Town of Mono is one of Dufferin's four "have" municipalities, as owner/operator of a landfill site on the Third Line EHS. (The others are Amaranth, Melancthon and Mulmur.)

The site happens to be perched near the edge of the Niagara Escarpment atop the porous Oak Ridges Moraine. As sites go, it's probably one of the worst conceivable in terms of controlling leachates, and surely far worse than the 200- acre site in East Luther Grand Valley that once was to house a county landfill and may one day be host to state-of-the-art gasification and composting plants.

Despite the huge risks of contamination the dump poses to nearby properties, the council seems to be giving serious consideration to a report by R. J. Burnside & Associates that recommends expropriation of the adjoining 28- hectare (66-acre) property of Jane Laurie and Laurie Mills so as to extend the landfill's contaminant attenuation zone.

Incredibly, the Burnside report includes a cost estimate of just $425,000 for the property, which includes two houses and a barn. At current real estate values, it's probably worth three times that much.

Now, the council has decided to order a "peer review" of the Burnside report for $3,000, which should be just enough for a single paragraph comment.

As we see it, the $3,000 expenditure would be merely good money after bad, and what the Town ought to be doing is approving plans to close the dump as soon as a new county facility is in operation.

The sad truth of the matter is that Dufferin's politicians have spent fully 30 years debating how to deal with the county's solid wastes and essentially gotten nowhere.

Today, all wastes from Orangeville, Shelburne, East Garafraxa and East Luther Grand Valley are being shipped out of the county, mainly to Michigan.

Meanwhile, Mono and the other three "have" municipalities have been obstructionist to the extreme, succeeding in their negative efforts mainly because of the strange voting rules at county council which, when it comes to such important matters, are the antithesis of "rep by pop."

Surely, the time has come for a consensus to be developed that Dufferin must have a modern means of handling its solid wastes within the current four-year mandates of the councils.

By now it should be obvious to anyone that there's no perfect solution to the problem, but that any solutions must involve a combination of recycling, composting and an element of disposal - and that decades-old dumps in the county should all be closed.