Dear Sir:
The recent debate over the Forceman Ridge landfill is acting as a smokescreen for the real issue facing the majority of the taxpayers of the Regional District of Kitimat-Stikine, namely: why should we pay twice?
The Ministry of Environment has established to the satisfaction of the City and the RD that a new site is necessary.
The $800,000 price for investigating the site's viability has already been spent, and the engineers and biologists have established to the satisfaction of the Ministry of Environment that the site will have a negligible impact on the environment. The process took far too long and cost far more than it should have, but the results are solid and we have them.
The self-focus group in the Lakelse Lake area wants all the studies and related spending to start up again, just to put it in someone else's backyard, and they want you and I to pay for it all over again.
The simple facts are being ignored in this exercise: the landfill will be almost invisible from the lake, and will have no detectable impact on the lake or the environment, even in a conservatively modelled worst case scenario. This is clear from the work that has been done.
I'm impressed with the strategy, because the enormous district-wide tax implications of starting all over again have been completely overshadowed by the unsubstantiated fears of the few. This is the outcry we should be hearing.
Brad North,
Terrace, B.C.