By Stephen Ogden
The County of Simcoe, in a recent press release, attempted to rationalize County Council’s direction to move ahead with a judicial review by Ontario’s Divisional Court. The County position is that the Judicial Review may be costly, however, it will yield savings over what is very likely to be an unsuccessful lawsuit against Jagger Hims Ltd., recently purchased by Genivar Income Fund. The County goes on to speculate that a successful ruling by the Court will help maintain longstanding relationships with external vendors and community partners.
The subject of the Judicial Review is whether or not the Information and Privacy Commission has the right to order a Municipality to take legal action against a third party to gain access to a record prepared for and paid for by taxpayers.
The total invoice cost to Simcoe County for Jagger Hims Ltd. modelling work for Site 41 was $20,000 plus GST. In 2007, the Site 41 Community Monitoring Committee arranged for an independent consultant to review the model at a cost of no more than $3,000. On the recommendation of County staff, County Council refused to release the records to the CMC. The cost to County residents of withholding the calibrated model records is unknown. We do know the County paid Jagger Hims Ltd. $127,000 to prepare the model for a meeting arranged by the Ministry of the Environment. Although the meeting did satisfy some concerns of the CMC, many questions remained unanswered. One can only speculate as to how much money has been spent on County lawyers to resist a Freedom of Information request from 2007. I would not be surprised to learn that the total cost to date could well be in the area of a quarter of a million dollars.
So let’s do the math. An independent consultant could have resolved the CMC’s outstanding concerns for $3,000 over two years ago. Instead the County has spent possibly $250,000 before they even go to Divisional Court. Now the taxpayers of Simcoe County and Ontario will pay the legal costs to determine who’s right or wrong. At the end of the day it is quite likely the decision will be appealed by the loser. The real losers are the taxpayers.
When it comes to maintaining long-standing relationships, the question should be asked as to why the County feels their relationship with Genivar Income Fund trumps the one with the very people County Council is supposed to serve. Let’s review the close relationship the County has with Genivar.
1. June 2005 David Merriman of MacViro Consultants attends at a Waste Diversion workshop for County Councillors.
2. 2006 Genivar purchases MacViro Consulting.
3. October 2007 David Merriman of Genivar Ontario Inc. presents a Business Case Analysis selecting Site 41 as the best solution for the County’s waste disposal needs.
4. 2008 Genivar purchases Henderson Paddon the designer of Site 41.
5. May 2009 Genivar Income Fund purchases Jagger Hims Ltd.
6. 2009 Stantec Consulting Limited is contracted to complete a new waste management plan for the entire County.
Ms. Janine Ralph and Mr. David Payne who are representing Stantec have considerable recent experience, both having worked for MacViro, a Division of Genivar.
It would appear a close relationship has developed between the County of Simcoe administration and Genivar. I would hope that at the January 18th upcoming meeting of the Waste Management Steering Committee, Stantec will share the already existing plans that the County had negotiated with Miller Waste Systems and CFB Borden for the development of a waste management facility.
Stephen Ogden is the applicant in the FOI request for the calibrated computer model.

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