LETTER: Why does the mayor keep bringing up the landfill?

'If Shoemaker keeps bringing this back until he gets the answer he wants, residents should be asking who he is really trying to protect from a tax increase: taxpayers, or himself,' reader asks

SooToday received the following letter in regards to landfill privatization: Mayor Shoemaker just cannot let this one go. Council voted down landfill privatization in March. Shoemaker was one of only four who voted for it.

Monday night, the private sector option was back on the table again, quietly reintroduced by the same mayor who already lost this argument once. At some point residents deserve to ask why. The Fifth Line site has about two and a half years of life left, a shortfall this administration and previous ones saw coming for years.

Rather than plan for it honestly, Shoemaker keeps steering us back toward handing the landfill to a private operator, the same GFL Environmental that came knocking with an unsolicited offer in the first place. Worth remembering: GFL was hit with 10 provincial charges for violating the Environmental Protection Act at its Hamilton area dump, and residents near that site have raised concerns about sulfur linked pollutants in the air.

That is the track record of the company Shoemaker keeps trying to bring back into the conversation. Here is what privatizing does not do. It does not make the cost disappear.

A private operator runs a landfill for profit, not out of civic duty, and that profit gets recovered from the same pocket municipal costs already come from, yours and mine. Council said no once. If Shoemaker keeps bringing this back until he gets the answer he wants, residents should be asking who he is really trying to protect from a tax increase: taxpayers, or himself.

Robert Peace, Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.