Newsletter

St Marys Cement triggers a new step in the
Aggregate Licence Process

Your action is required!

As expected Registered Letters from St Marys Cement started arriving this first week of January 2010. These letters are the latest correspondence sent to the over 1,200 people who took the time to submit their objections to the proposed St Marys Cement Flamborough Quarry in April \ May 2009. If you were one of them, Thank You for making your objections known then. Unfortunately St Marys Cement is already forcing you to renew your objections once more, or they will be considered withdrawn.

(If you did not send in objections to the Aggregate Licence Application back in the spring of 2009, St Marys Cement seems to have stopped communicating with you. You did not receive their Newsletter #9 sent in the Fall of 2009 nor would you have be receiving the letters indicating how St Marys Cement was dealing with (or not dealing with) the concerns and objections raised by our Community. This material is however available to you on the FORCE website so that you can stay engaged with this important community issue.)

The Aggregate Licence process gives the applicant two years to finalize their application and attempt to resolve any concerns from stakeholders. Normally during this two year time frame, applicants meaningfully modify their applications through revised technical work and stakeholder discussions. St Marys Cement, by contrast, has not made any modifications to their original application and now just six months after the original comment period had closed they are requiring us to participate in another round of objection submissions by triggering a 20 day Notice of Objector Response process.

This process which is started by the sending of registered letters to objectors, requires objectors to respond by registered mail and to reconfirm their objections or their objections may be considered withdrawn. As already stated, this process normally occurs near the end of the two year application timeline and only after applicants have made efforts to resolve objections. In our situation, St Marys Cement is forcing us to go through this process now, without any changes to their original proposal, and as they have given us no reason to withdraw our objections, why would we?

All of us need to ensure that we don't let St Marys Cement succeed with this inconsiderate use of the Aggregate Licence process. The scope of this proposed massive industrial open pit mine is clear. Documents submitted as part of the Aggregate Licence application provide the following information:

 

• Site Operations are planned six days a week, Monday through Saturday.
• Onsite activities start at 7:00 a.m. and operate until 7:00 p.m. on weekdays and until 12 noon on Saturdays.
• Trucking operations start at 6:00 a.m. each day with peak truck activities estimated at 1 truck movement every 26 seconds.
• Removal of 3 million tonnes per year, creating an average excavation depth of 32 meters or 100 feet, over an area of 164 acres, just 3kms north of Carlisle.
• Proposing an untested, theoretical groundwater mitigation system to address the acknowledged unacceptable impact on groundwater. This system will be required to pump 90 million litres of water per day for the life of the project.
• An estimated project lifespan of 25 to 30 years just on the original parcel of lands, not including the 154 acres of land St Marys Cement owns to the west.

If Approved, this Proposal will Change Our Communities Forever!
We Can't Let That Happen, We Must Join Together and Stop the Quarry!

To make it easier for all of us to respond to St Marys Cement's use of the Notice of Objector Response process we have arranged the following:

 

• Objection Reconfirmation Template Letters have been prepared for your use. These letters need to be sent to both St Marys Cement and the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) just as our original objections did. This time though, they need to be sent by registered or confirmed delivery.
• A Public Meeting will be held on Wednesday January 20th at 6:30pm at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Elementary School (Presentation at 7pm). At this meeting we will explain the process, update you on what has happened since our last meeting, answer any questions that you might have, and collect completed Objection Reconfirmation Letters so that we can deliver them to St Marys Cement and MNR for you.
• For those that can't make the meeting on January 20th, staffed Drop-In Centres will be operating from Thursday January 21st to Saturday January 23rd at the Carlisle Farm Market Video Store (Thu & Fri 6pm to 9pm, Sat 10am to 3pm) and also on Saturday January 23rd at the Campbellville Lions Hall (10 to 3pm). Representatives will be available to answer any questions that they will have a supply of template letters that can be completed and submitted then and there.
• Drop-off Boxes to collect letters for delivery will also be located at both Our Lady of Mount Carmel Elementary School & Balaclava Public School during the school day starting on Wednesday January 13th.

 

To make things easier, and to save everyone the cost of sending registered letters, we will be collecting the completed objection reconfirmation letters and arranging for registered delivery to both St Marys Cement and MNR. If you are dropping off completed letters, please ensure that you provided two copies of the letters both signed and dated, and both with your complete mailing address including building #, street name, city, province, and postal code.

And remember each person who sent in an original objection letters needs to reconfirm their objections. Blank copies of the template letter will be available at the Public Meeting on January 20th, on the website (www.StopTheQuarry.ca), and at the staffed Drop-In centres.

We would prefer that you forward your letters to us in order that we can make sure that everyone is accounted for. If you live outside of the local area, please feel free to mail copies of your completed letters to us and we will then forward them to St Marys Cement and MNR. You can send your letters via regular mail to FORCE c/o Lawson Park Ltd., Box#15 RR#1 Freelton, Ontario L0R 1K0.

St Marys Cement is also making this process more complicated by staggering the dates of when they trigger the 20 day period. Most people who used the template objection letter this spring received a copy of the response from St Marys Cement back in October \ November of 2009 and then their registered letter in early January 2010, this make their due date February 1st, 2010. Some people who wrote custom objection letters only received their first response from St Marys over the holiday season, and it is not known when they might be receiving their registered letter. The process requires that we reconfirm our objections within 20 days of receiving the registered letter. We need to ask everyone to pay careful attention to what timeline they need to follow. The due date for your response is shown on the cover page, the NMR Notice of Objector Response Form in the second to last paragraph. We will continue to collect letters and monitor the timeline in order to ensure that everyone get there reconfirmation of objections submitted despite how difficult the process becomes.

(And note, if you have decided not to pick up your registered letter from the Post Office, the aggregate application process considers the registered letters to have been delivered after 5 days, whether or not you ever sign for it. So leaving the letter at the Post Office doesn't really help and you still need to send in your objection reconfirmation letter or your original objections may be considered withdrawn.)

We won't be fooled by St Marys Cement's empty response to our objections. To us, it appears that St Marys Cement is just ticking another box on its "to do" list for the aggregate license process. Perhaps they hope that by making us jump through some more hoops, they can dramatically reduce the number of objectors. However, since they have given us no reasons to withdraw our objections, let's show St Marys Cement that we have no intention of doing so. Our objections are substantive and appropriate. Let's do whatever we need to do to make sure that our objections remain in force.