The City of Ottawa will continue its parti-cipation in the bidding process to potentially acquire a private landfill site near Carlsbad Springs at Boundary Road and Hwy. 417.

City council gave its blessing to the pro-cess in a closed door, in-camera session during last week’s city council meeting. No actual vote was taken, because no vote is needed until it’s determined whether or not the bid is accepted by the site’s current owners Taggart Miller Environmental Services.

In order to enter the bidding process to purchase the 475-acre site, the City had to sign a non-disclosure agreement which is standard practice. As a result, the amount of the City’s bid cannot be made public nor can any other details of the process, including whether or not there are any other bidders.

“Given the requirements for confiden-tiality, details will be reported out once the bidding process is over and the non-disclosure agreement has been lifted,” Ottawa mayor Mark Sutcliffe told council after the in-camera session.

“I look forward to sharing the process with residents and we will be able to do so when the process comes to an end. This is an issue of timing not transparency.”

The City’s decision to bid on the landfill site is extremely controversial for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that there a great deal of people who have been opposed to the landfill site going back to when the Markham-based Miller Group and the Ottawa-based Taggart Investments first joined forces to ask the provincial government to grant them a permit to operate it as such in 2010.

Faced with the prospect of the Trail Road landfill site reaching it’s capacity in 10-15 years, the city is in need of an alternative location to deal with its solid waste. In July, city council directed staff to examine three potential options: using existing private landfill sites, building a waste to energy facility; or creating a new landfill site at a location to be determined.

By bidding on the Boundary site, the city can combine both the first and third options without having to go through the politically challenging and time consuming process of deciding on the location of a future site and getting provincial approval.

Opponents of the city’s decision to bid on the Boundary Road site, are worried that it will take any possibility of building a waste to energy facility off the table for years to come.

Orléans East-Cumberland councillor Matt Luloff believes waste to energy technology, which has been used around the world for years, is the way of the future. He wants to make sure that waste-to-energy is still an option and that it won’t be dismissed as a result if the City’s bid for the Taggart-Miller site is successful.

During last Wednesday’s meeting staff assured council that purchasing the site would not take a waste to energy facility off the table and that a new landfill would still be required even if Ottawa were to build an incinerator.