The title of the article in yesterday's Woolwich Observer on page 5 is "Woolwich shifts gears again on committee monitoring Elmira chemical plant". I would characterize it as one of the strongest articles criticizing Woolwich Township's behaviour surrounding public consultation and their history of public advisory committees, in many years. By implication if not by name the strong criticism would include CAO David Brenneman and somewhat to a lesser extent former councillor Mark Bauman.
Quoting the Observer's article written by Steve Kannon "...the 2015 split, which essentially removed both the citizen and the watchdog function of what was a public advisory group reaching back to the early days 35 years ago...". This references the immoral and unethical behaviour of Sandy Shantz, Mark Bauman, David Brenneman, Pat McLean and Susan Bryant with their sham April 9/15 "stakeholders" meeting in which only one CPAC member was invited while other totally uninvolved with groundwater remediation citizens were invited (eg. Inge Rinne).
Further quotes include "The goal in splitting up the committee was to entice both the company, then Chemtura, and the Ministry of Environment back to the table by eliminating some of the most vocal critics from the process. The idea was for meetings to be less adversarial." Imagine that, both Chemtura and the Min. of Environment were obfuscating as well as using junk science to back up their do as little as possible cleanup and citizens appointed to hold them accountable became adversarial. Shocking (not). A further point in 2015 is that dissenting councillor Pat Merlihan referred to the alleged "citizen" makeup of RAC & TAG as "cringeworthy".
As I was a Delegate to last week's council meeting, the Observer also quoted some of my comments to councillors such as "This new plan is just the same old don't rock the boat, let Lanxess and the [ministry] do their thing and allow another 35 years of slow leakage into both our aquifers and our creek,". Furthermore I also stated "I'd rather see Woolwich abandon the field rather than continue to tarnish themselves by being cheerleaders for the two biggest polluters in the province.". The two biggest polluters being Uniroyal/Lanxess and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment.
It is being gentle suggesting that Woolwich Township has improperly been in bed with Uniroyal/Lanxess for the last 35 years. Apparently they like and wish to continue that arrangement for the next 35 years.
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