ERIN – Erin councillors seem unsure about remediation plans for a gravel pit near Hillsburgh.
Pit owner, 1772853 Ontario Inc., brought a site alteration permit application to restore the former sand and gravel pit to council on Oct. 9.
Located at 9516 Sideroad 27, the site has operated as a sand and gravel pit for Strada Aggregates since 1999.
Below-the-water-table extraction resulted in a pond with a surface area of approximately 9.6 hectares and a depth of four to five metres.
Gravel and sand are no longer being extracted from the site and the licence will be surrendered to the ministry once the site alteration agreement has been executed.
According to the application, due to the amount of fill required to remediate the property, the project is expected to take 10 to 15 years at 150 truckloads per day.
The pit would be open to receive clean fill from 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday, with site grading and maintenance activities proposed to take place between 7am to 2pm on Saturdays.
The proposal is to return the land back to agricultural zoning.
Erin resident Brittney Pakkala objected to the plan at the Oct. 9 council meeting.
“When I read the remediation proposal for the Hillsburgh quarry, I was deeply disheartened,” said Pakkala.
“The suggested plan had given little thought as to the implications of the surrounding community and even less thought to the environment.”
Pakkala was especially displeased with the proposed traffic volumes.
“Let’s for a moment imagine what the proposal would look like. It would look like over 500,000 dump trucks driving down our small road, past our homes, every two minutes for the next 10 to 15 years,” said Pakkala.
“Instead of the smell of fresh country air, we would smell the fumes of half a million trucks, each one comparable to 30 car emissions.”
The company also requested a reduced tipping fee of $1 per cubic metre, half of the standard $2 fee included in the town’s site alteration bylaw.
“I really need clarification so I can better explain it to our constituents why we would reduce the fees,” said councillor Bridget Ryan.
Pit representative Jay Fieger said the town’s site alteration bylaw doesn’t consider high volume, large-scale and long-duration projects like the proposal and insisted the project would bear “no cost to the town.”
“We’re talking about wear and tear on our roads, not for a little while, but for 10 to 15 years and a lot of heavy truck traffic,” said councillor John Brennan.
“If this goes ahead, I can’t see any reason for us to reduce the tipping fee.”
Fieger said the company proposed a fee reduction because the project needs to be viable, citing only two ways to do it: either restarting extraction for another 20 years or returning it to agricultural land.
“I have to be able to afford to do it,” said Fieger.
“I’m trying very hard to make this a project, to return this to farmland. But if I have to operate in the aggregate pit to undertake this, then that’s what I have to do.”
Council voted unanimously to refer the application back to staff until late November, when the draft Transportation Master Plan is presented.
