by Judi McLeod
September 13, 2004
| Chapter 14 from Tony O'Donohue's book The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment |
In a compelling new book called The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment, former Toronto City Councillor and senior engineer Tony O’Donohue tells all.
The respected civil engineer calls the transportation of garbage from Toronto to Michigan the "red ribbon of shame" that "snakes its way daily from Toronto to the U.S. border."
Folks should know the Toronto sludge is not going over the border in insignificant amounts: "almost all the sludge processed at Toronto’s ashbridges Bay Treatment Plant is being hauled to Republic Landfill in Michigan."
For the record, about 88-90 percent of all the sludge produced in the City of Toronto is processed at ashbridges Bay. Because the Michigan haulage is tied to a four-year contract, it’s not expected to end anytime soon.
These are just some of the riveting details enclosed within the pages of Re-Engineering the Urban Environment. Due to hit the stands in six weeks, The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment is a compelling read, telling the fascinating tale of the $95 million Toronto sludge saga.
O’Donohue’s step-by-step story takes readers behind the scenes at Toronto City Hall and comes only after a good deal of detective work into a massive paper trail. The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment reveals, over a four-year period, the unearthed details of two city contracts--one to Terratec Environmental Inc. for haul and spread and the other to US Filter for pelletizing--and how they were "mere window-dressing to hide the shipment of sludge to Michigan."
When the $23 million pelletizing plant at the Main Treatment Plant, ashbridges Bay (MTP) burned down on august 23, 2003, it not only "conveniently solved" a problem--but ended "opening up the road to Michigan!"
"From March 1999 to May 2003, the sludge mess was an expensive, poorly managed foul-up, which cost Toronto taxpayers dearly. The failure of the sludge program was the responsibility of the top manangement of the city's Works Department, who presided over the blowing away of the of $95 million, and the responsibility must be shared by activists and number of east-end politicians who put politics over public interest."
The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment unravels how "the pelletizing plant was built without a marketing plan and with little positive direction from management" and how "the paper trail to council was cluttered with bits of information which did not address the overall, real ongoing problems of sludge management."
"The Terratec `haul to Michigan’ contract guarantees the company a profit and a final resting place for Toronto sludge--at least for now."
O’Donohue’s persistence in getting the truth took him down a "painful difficult" road, and it was only after five attempts that city council, at its July 20, 2004 meeting finally directed the Works Commissioner to provide him the information.
"I received the information on the sludge disposal and the capital costs for the six years from the Director, Wastewater Treatment, Works Department, in a letter dated July 27, 2004," O’Donohue said. "The information, which should be public and available to any taxpayer, shows that Toronto sludge is now hauled to Michigan, with Toronto garbage." (Emphasis ours).
Rather than just leveling criticism at the system as many authors do, O’Donohue provides potential solutions in a list of sound recommendations.
Toronto city council, he says, "needs an `arms length’ investigation–a total re-evaluation of the sludge mess and the reasons it happened. It needs an MFP (Toronto computer leasing scandal) type of inquiry. That sadly would probably cost $10 million, and would only prove how incompetence rules our city."
Canada Free Press is proud to be the first to publish, word-for-word O’Donohue’s unabridged Chapter 14, Sludge--the cost of incompetence from the fascinating The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment.
Tony O’Donohue can be reached at: tonyodonohue@yahoo.com
Encyclopedia of the environment
although sludge is all the talk because Toronto’s garbage is being hauled to a Michigan landfill site, there’s a treasure trove of all things environmental in the about-to-be-released The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment.
More than environmentalists, government mandarins and CEOs won’t be able to put the book down.
From its opening introduction a City in Crisis, chapters in Part 1 The Making of a city include Managing Urban Systems, The Nuclear neighbor, Electricity: fading to black among others.
Part II’s Hard Services takes the reader through chapters on Cleaning up the water to Transit systems, all of it written in O’Donohue’s signature swift-moving, no-nonsense style.
So much more than a coffee table book, The Tale of a City: Re-Engineering the Urban Environment is the Inside Story and the definitive, thought-provoking a-B-C’s of today’s troubling environmental issues.
Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com
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