UPDATED: Stouffville mayors past, present want council fill decision overturned
Facebook group 'Hydrovac Protest Group' meeting Sept. 8

YorkRegion.com
Sept. 2, 2016

A new group that includes the current mayor of Whitchurch-Stouffville and a former mayor says it will ask town council to overturn a decision it made last month.

The Facebook group “Hydrovac Protest Group” was created this week. The page has former mayor Sue Sherban as an administrator and Mayor Justin Altmann as a member.

The group is meeting Thursday (Sept. 8)  at 8:30 p.m. at the Stouffville Arena meeting rooms. (The event had been scheduled for the council chambers.)

They’re concerned with an amendment approved by council in a 4-3 vote Aug. 23 that allows hydrovac trucks to unload at United Soils Management Ltd. pit on Ninth Line, south of Musselman’s Lake.

We “believe the waste and fill from hydrovac trucks pose a danger to our environment and well water,” the now 599-member group’s Facebook description reads.

Sherban, who was mayor from 2003-06, compares the United Soils story to a landfill site that operated on Hwy. 48.

Before being shut down by the province, the site, just south of Ballantrae, put Whitchurch-Stouffville on the map during the early 1980s over fears dumped chemicals contaminated area water supplies.

“Residents needed to have been notified with a fire siren,” said Sherban of last month’s decision.

“Council know they need to overturn their decision and not allow the permit for the dumping of contaminated soils to be allowed in our town. Those who were here and those that are new to this town need to know we fought to close a contaminated dumping site on Hwy. 48 back in the 1983.”

Officials at the former gravel pit disagree.

“There are no tricks here," Alec Cloke, owner and operator of United Soils Management Ltd., said in an interview Tuesday. "The fill that comes in isn’t contaminated. The rules with my company and the town are that the town inspector doesn’t have to phone ahead, he gets to walk into our office and go through our files at will, whenever he feels like doing it.”