Heather Wright/The Independent

Chatham-Kent Mayor Darrin Canniff is downplaying the meetings he had with consultants and executives from York 1 Environmental Waste Services as far back as 2019.

That’s the company which purchased the former Dresden dump in 2022 and now hopes to build a construction waste recycling center and rebuild the landfill to use. As many as 700 trucks are estimated to be needed to bring the amount of waste the Mississauga company plans to recycle and landfill at the Irish School Road property which is flanked by homes. 

When the company’s plans became public, Canniff said Chatham-Kent had never been consulted and had not been offered cash in a host agreement.

But email messages obtained by The Independent under the Freedom of Information  Act show Canniff met with representatives for York1 as early as 2019. The mayor has ignored multiple request for an interview however Monday, North Kent Councillor Rhonda Jubenville made a statement reiterating while she knew York1 was working on a project in Dresden, she had no idea of the scope of what was planned. 

Mayor Canniff then offered his explanation about why he didn’t reveal he’d met with York1. “We meet with a lot of businesses and individuals, and they talk about their plans. So they’ll call up and they’ll say, ‘we’d love to talk to you about this. We want to purchase this. We want to build that. We want to do this.’ So we meet with them,” he said. 

“Until that is a actual project, it doesn’t come to council, because I know that I’ve met with a lot of people, and they’ll have one plan one month, and the next month they’ll call up and say, you know, we thought about something different. It’s something different again. So that’s, that’s kind of what’s happened there.”

Canniff also blamed York1 saying “our full expectation is they’re going to call us and keep us informed. So all sudden, …we get a notice saying, Here they’re doing this. So they never let us know that they acquired it… We’re caught off guard completely with what they’re planning on doing.”

But a letter from York1 President Brian Brunetti, in the company’s filing to the Environmental Registry of Ontario tells a different story.  Brunetti says “since the inception of its project, York1 has informed the Municipality of Chatham-Kent of their plans for the project and consulted directly with the municipality.” That included a Dec. 2021 meeting with the mayor, according to the letter, where the company outlined “our interest in acquiring the Dresden landfill, developing a regenerative recycling facility and outlining our interest in entering a host-community agreement.”

Brunetti says the company met with the mayor again in Feb. 2022 “and had numerous meetings and calls throughout 2022 and 2023 with municipal staff, local councillors and further meetings with the mayor.”

Email messages obtained by The Independent showed multiple meetings at local restaurants in the time frame Brunetti references. “During these meetings, York1 outlined our plans for the Dresden Landfill and indicated our interest in entering into an equitable host-community agreement with the municipality. The tone in the meetings was supportive and collaborative and it was through these meetings that York1 agreed to limit the waste accepted at the facility to non-hazardous construction waste as per the municipalities’ request to York1. Municipal support was communicated at these meetings,” writes Brunetti. It was withdrawn, he said, when there was a public outcry about the project.

Canniff denies there was a municipal commitment. “We fully expect that the individuals we talk to are going to communicate two ways on this,” he said Monday. “I want to clarify again, that there’s no commitment made that council is the one that decides on these projects.”

The project is now subject to an Environmental Assessment.