To accommodate all eight lower-tier municipal councils comfortably, Dufferin County Council’s Community Development Committee (CDC) has chosen Orangeville Fairgrounds as its venue for a session next Thursday evening on waste management.

The 7 p.m. meeting is designed to reach a consensus on what the county bylaw to assume all waste management responsibilities should contain.

The bylaw that has received two readings at county council has four essential conditions for the transfer of responsibility: that the assumption will happen only if the Energy from Waste (EFW) facility at Dufferin Eco Energy Park

DEEP) is deemed feasible; that the timing of assumption coincides with the commissioning of the EFW plant; that the county does not take over existing landfill sites; and that the county should work in the interim with interested municipalities to co-ordinate the collection process in an effort to find cost savings.

If a consensus is reached at the meeting, and if the wishes of at least a majority of lower tier can be satisfied, a full county council would be convened, amendments to the bylaw would be voted on, and there would be a motion to give the amended bylaw third reading at a special meeting of the council Sept. 9.

Leading up to next week’s meeting, there have been dif- ferences of opinion among the lower tier. Generally, Mono would like the takeover to happen by 2014 but Amaranth wants it to be two years sooner, in 2012. Mono wants the county to take over its dump as part of the deal such that everyone pays to close and rehabilitate it, but Amaranth wants to keep its.

East Luther Grand Valley said early on it would like the county to assume the waste early in 2011 and take over the Luther Marsh landfill site it is paying to close. The small township said, however, it would not let the issue stand in the way.

Shelburne, where the county’s CDC chairman is mayor, has given second reading to its own bylaw but is waiting for the results of the Aug. 12 meeting before giving third reading.

The Shelburne concern is that it has spent money to rehabilitate its former landfill site. This, its council agreed at a recent meeting, has meant an increase in taxes for ratepayers. The town has not used any of the other landfill sites in the county, and is not in favour of paying for dumps it has never used. This, said move A.J. Cavey and seconder Walter Benotto, would be unfair to the taxpayers.

A few years ago, a representative of the Ministry of Environment during the decade-long deliberations of the Waste Management Master Plan steering committee, urged the county to take over waste responsibilities. At the time, the owners of the dumps objected – saying their sites were valuable assets.

Since then, Mono as an example has had to expand its property at its dump to contain a leachate plume within its own boundaries as required by the Certificate of Approval, and in the meantime Grand Valley Conservation Authority has ended the East Luther lease on its dump site.

In full view of the history of waste disposal in Dufferin, in which the county has thus far taken over only the composting and the hazardous wastes, next Thursday’s meeting promises to be a complicated affair.