Ted Prior Questions District Lease for Wood Waste Disposal

By Gagandeep Ghuman
Published: Feb. 4, 2012

A newly elected councillor wants to re-write a few rules at the Squamish municipal hall.

Councillor Ted Prior says there needs to be vigorous debate and community consultation on public interest issues before they are voted in an in-camera meeting.

The rookie councillor’s ire has come to rest on a five-year wood waste disposal lease the previous council awarded last year in a closed-door meeting.

The lease put the district in a financial disadvantage, was for an environmentally unsustainable operation, and was never brought before the public for consultation, Coun. Prior said.

Just before its term ended, the district granted a five-year lease, from Jan.1, 2012 to Dec. 31, 2016, for $3,900 to Squamish Wood Waste Ltd. for disposal of wood waste on a 14.9 acres site near the airpot.

Squamish Wood Waste Ltd., owned and operated by Alan Barr, buries the wood waste. The gravel extracted is sold, for which the company pays a royalty to the province. Barr has been operating the site since early 90s.

Prior said he was suspicious the way this particular lease was passed during the busy Christmas time.

“It’s like they were trying to sneak this at a time when no one was looking,” he said.

He also questioned its financial prudence.

“There is truck after truck of stuff going there. And what we are getting out of this? May be $300 a month,” he said.

And most of all, he says the time has come to rethink our wood waste.

“Burying wood waste is no way to get rid of it. We need to recycle it,” Prior said.

He said he has been getting emails and phone calls from residents complaining about the trucks.

“As a councillor, I’m finding about the lease from the newspaper. The community should have debated this kind of thing,” he said.  

Coun. Ron Sander agrees.

“My preference would be to have public input on such leases as ultimately the land involved is a public asset,” Sander said.

“The terms of this lease, the need for a wood waste landfill should be better communicated so the public have a better understanding of what is actually happening.”

He also said Squamish needs to evolve to deal with the waste, not “bury it for someone to deal with”.

‘NO SWEET DEAL, NOT BY A LONG SHOT’: COUN. RACE

Coun. Doug Race was in the in-camera council meeting when the lease was signed, and he said there was an intense debate in the council about it.

Matters of land dispositions are done in-camera for a reason, he stressed.

“To have a negotiation in public can strategically disadvantage us, and the business in consideration often wants to keep it private too,” Race said.

When asked if there is way the public wanted to protest a lease, he said:

“I guess the simple answer is you vote against the person in the next elections. When you are elected by the community, they entrust you with their business,” he added.

Waste wood consists of bark, wood, tops, including foliage and branches that are ground-up, broken, crushed or whole.

Local logging companies, including Garibaldi Forest Products and Squamish Mills, send their wood waste from dry land sorts to Barr’s operation near the airport.

Alan Barr was in Hawaii and could not be reached for comment.

Speaking on his behalf, Peter Gordon of Cascadia Consulting answered a few questions about the past and present of the operation to the best of his ability.

Gordon said Barr’s wood waste operation came out of a dire need to find a solution to the large quantity of wood waste generated by logging operations in Squamish.

“This was never meant to be a money making operation. It was about wood waste disposal,” Gordon said.

Barr has been running a legal operation for over 20 years that is duly inspected and regulated by the Ministry of Environment from time to time. There has never been a substantiated complaint against Barr in these two decades, Gordon added

The lease for Wood Waste Ltd. doesn’t specify precisely what wood waste products can be hauled and how much.

Gordon said there is no quantity mentioned partly because wood waste can vary from year to year. As long as it’s tested for contamination, Barr is allowed to bring in wood waste, and other material, for instance, brush and stumps that are removed before new construction.   

It’s unfortunate the issue creeps up every few years, he said, because Barr has run a legal operation while unregulated, illegal dumping of wood waste carries on unabated.

 RECYCLING WOOD

One can certainly question the political dynamics at the municipal hall that led to the five-year lease for Alan Barr, or for that matter, any other lease the muncipality signs.

But if there’s something that is unquestionable, it is this: Recycling wood is better than burying it in the ground or dumping it in the landfill.

This commonsensical view was enforced in 2008 by Dr. Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management in a research paper that analysed wood waste management methods.

For every one ton, the study found, recycling wood chips can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 4,700 pound, using it as alternative fuel by 3,300 pounds.

Using landfill for it has the reverse effect: More than 1,000 pound of carbon emissions. According to Don’t Waste Wood, in 2005, wood waste in landfills accounted for 24.4 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions—the equivalent of 4.7 million passenger vehicles on our road.

All wood waste has varying levels of contamination from mineral soil, rock, steel, and rubber, but these contaminations are far less from paved sort yards.

It’s the ‘contaminated’ wood waste that goes into Barr’s site near the airport.

When all log sorting moves to paved sort yards, the Squamish Wood Waste would also ‘evolve,’ Gordon said.

John Lowe from Squamish Mills knows that time will come.

Squamish Mills sends a ‘lot of wood waste’ to Alan Barr’s site for burial, but Lowe said he knows ‘recycling’ is the best option.

“Down the road, there is no other option but to recycle,” Lowe agreed.

Squamish Mills used to send some wood waste to Triack Resources, but discontinued for myriad number of professional reasons.

He said Squamish Mills is planning to set up a wood waste recycling operation in the coming few years.

Meanwhile, Coun. Prior said he hopes there will be more debate in the community on issues of public interest and enviromental sustainability in the future.

“If such a lease came before me, I won’t be able to suport it,” Prior said.