REFORM OF CPAC MINUTES & MOTIONS NEEDED

All public Chemtura Public Advisory Committee (CPAC) meetings are taped in their entirety. To the best of my knowledge this has always been so. These tapes have always been under the care and control of Woolwich Township. A secretary provided by either the Township or formerly the Region has written up the Minutes of meetings using the tapes as the basis (and or any notes they've taken during the meeting).

These meetings are normally three hours long and the Minutes usually are between 5 to 7 pages long. Obviously three hours of talking can not possibly all fit into 5-7 pages of the Minutes. Hence right off the bat there is a lot of subjectivity in regards as to what is significant and important enough to make the Minutes. None of the three Secretaries over the last twenty years have had any training in regards to hydrogeology, chemistry, pollution issues etc.. Neither have they had any training in the history or specifics of Uniroyal Chemical and their on-site waste disposal in Elmira.

For many years each new meeting and Agenda have had an "Approval of Minutes" section early on in the meeting. Both CPAC members and the attending public offer suggestions and corrections to the Minutes from the previous meeting. When the meeting was held only a month prior then memories of the meeting are at least reasonably fresh. On the other hand there have been dozens of meetings following CPAC layoffs of between two months and as much as six months. Finally copies of these Amended Minutes are no longer routinely provided to either CPAC members or the public. This is a huge failure in democratic process. They used to be so provided. The Agenda a long time ago had "A Discussion of Draft Minutes" section for the immediately previous meeting as well as "An Approval of Revised Minutes" section for the Amended Minutes from the meeting before that.

The situation in regards to CPAC Motions is even fuzzier. In one of our local newspapers is an aside to the fact that Woolwich Council must ratify every Motion passed by their Committee of Council, namely CPAC. Really! Twenty years plus in and this is news to me. Surely this doesn't include routine matters such as "Approval of the Minutes" and "Update of Agenda" , or does it? It certainly includes the appointment and dismissal of CPAC members and the naming of a vice-chair (David Marks). Has it ever included significant environmental statements passed by CPAC such as the July 2003 Request For Action? Clearly what is long overdue is an ongoing list of all CPAC Motions as well as verification as to whether or not they've been presented to Woolwich Council or not for ratification. Why do I suspect that past Chairs of CPAC have cherry picked CPAC Motions for presentation to Council? Why do I suspect that in the past Woolwich Council have used these procedural tools to aid and abet their favourite local polluter? Probably because in the last twenty-two years I've seen every imaginable bit of manipulation and skullduggery possible. Public Consultation in Elmira has been all about Public Manipulation since the get go.