CONTAMINATED PROPERTIES ALLOWED TO SIT FOR DECADES

The headline above should be the headline in the Record. Instead their headline in last Friday's Waterloo region record is "City to slash price in bid to sell contaminated property". The property is the former Electrohome building at 152 Shanley St. in Kitchener. It is currently owned by a numbered Ontario company (848835) who have blatantly ignored both paying taxes on the property and cleaning up the serious contamination on the site. The contamination includes heavy metals, petroleum hydrocarbons and volatile organic compounds (VOCS). These VOCS include trichloroethylene (TCE) which is the particularly nasty compound which adversely affected the health of many in the Bishop St. community in Cambridge as well as in Woburn, Massachusetts. The U.S. location was the one in the John Travolta movie "A Civil Action".

References by city officials to a "charette" are sort of laughable. The city are in a gross conflict of interest position. They want to start recouping taxes on the property. Hence they will likely "gild the lily" when talking to local residents. They will oversell the quality of the alleged "cleanup" in order to get neighbourhood "buy in". The reality is that even if it was redeveloped for residential use the cleanup would be suspect. If it's redeveloped for commercial or industrial use the cleanup will be even less. Substantially so. Throughout this the Ontario Ministry of Environment will do what they do best which is bullshit, bafflegab and blatantly lie to the public about how their health is of the utmost importance to the M.O.E. and city. If that was true all levels of government would have cleaned up this dangerous contaminated site a very long time ago. They have not.

Lastly let's see just how transparent the cleanup actually is. Will there be Workplans ahead of time along with an independent peer review of them? Don't hold your breathe. This is all about money folks; money that none of the neighbourhood will ever see for their exposure to this eyesore and health hazard for decades.