Ontario OKs huge incinerator

The incinerator industry is gloating after wearing down public opposition to a huge, quarter-billion dollar garbage burning plant that is now going to be built in the small community of Clarington. Ontario.

It's a zero-risk venture for the incineration industry giant Covanta energy.

The project is going to be "funded and owned" by the citizens of the York and Durham regions. This deal means guaranteed earnings for Covanta, with all the risk and cost borne by the public.

This is the same path that Metro Vancouver has chosen in its solid waste plan that got the green light from the provincial government last month. But the story isn't over yet.

We do things differently in BC.

Incineration is a natural component of the traditional "integrated waste management" system that still flourishes in Ontario and other jurisdictions. Integrated waste management combines garbage and recycling programs under the umbrella of muncipal services.

Cities operate recycling trucks alongside garbage trucks, recycling plants alongside landfills and incinerators. It all falls on the municipality's shoulders to sort it out and dispose of it responsibly.

It's an end-0f-pipe treatment system that ensures waste doesn't pile up in the streets. But it has failed to make any dent on the overproduction and overconsumption of throw-away products and packaging that is driving global warming and depleting natural resources.

Incinerators are just a more efficient system for detroying the evidence of our overconsumption.

But there is a revolution happening in BC. We are making producers responsible for taking back their throw-away products and packaging.

We won't need big municipal incinerators any more.

Unless we are foolish enough to spend public money and incur public risk to provide producers with an easy way to get rid the stuff they take back from us.

Who would win then?

GHG accounting - incineration's downfall

Metro Vancouver has hit a snag in its plan to build a garbage incineration empire: provincial regulation of GHG emissions.

In May the Metro Energy Committee learned (Item 5.2 in this agenda) that its existing Burnaby incinerator is the 4th largest emitter of GHG's in the region. Under the provincial cap-and-trade program the emissions from this incinerator alone will cost the region $3 million a year uin 2012 ("equivalent to 30 per cent of revenues," as reported in today's paper.)

This month Metro staff are bringing another report to the Committee ( Item 5.3 in this agenda).

This latest report whines that the province is being unfair to incinerators. Incinerators are subject to cap-and-trade costs while landfills are not. Landfills are covered by a separate piece of legislation. Metro staff admit in the report that they have not been able to bully the provincial officials into giving incinerators a break. Accordingly, the report recommends that the politicians on the Board get involved.

But the province has it right. You can reduce GHG emissions from landfills. All you have to do is keep organic materials out -- something Metro intends to do by 2015. It's rotting organic materials that are the source of landfill GHGs. Once the organics are gone, landfills will be a storage place for materials that potentially will be useful to our grandchildren.

But incinerators can't operate without sending carbon into the atmosphere -- GHG landfills in the sky. They vaporize the resources that future generations will need.

The kids are all right

Metro politicians really let us down this summer.

Check out this video and answer this question: will the Metro Board's incinerators help solve our problem? What is going to be left the kid who made this video and the rest of his generation if we burn their inheritance...

It's not over until the Minister signs off -- he's waiting to hear from us: env.minister@gov.bc.ca

Metro politicians looking for places to cut? Start with a half-billion dollar incinerator.

At today's meeting of the Metro Waste Committee the taxpayer burden was very much on our politicians' minds.

They're faced with billions of dollars in urgent needs -- Translink, upgrades to the sewage system, the water treatment system. It goes on and on. When, our politicians wondered aloud , are our local taxpayers going to revolt?

While they were anguishing over this, Johnny Carline (CAO) introduced the topic of whether the new Solid Waste Management Plan should allow the use of out-of-region incineration as a back-up plan to in-region incineration. (cost: an extra 30% by Metro's own reckoning - but Carline didn't mention this).

If our politicians are looking for a place to trim public costs, isn't the incinerator project where they should be starting?

Why are we even talking about going into debt to clean up a mess that should be handled by the producers of throw-away products and packaging? What about producer responsibility?

Incinerators not only let producers off the hook -- they do it at taxpayer cost. Darrell Mussato (North Van City) noted that EPR programs get municipalities out of paying the high cost of waste management. Then the moment passed.

But when the penny drops that building a big incinerator is going to be a public hand-out to the corporations that Derek Corrigan (Burnaby) and Joe Trasolini (Port Moody) were rightly criticizing as not interested in waste reduction, we may see a turn-around.

Write dmussatto@cnv.org a quick note of encouragement!

Pic: Darrell Mussato

Is the tide turning against incineration?

This has been a bad week for the world's incinerator salesmen and their local government backers.

On Monday, China's middle class "lodged its first mass challenge against the government by staging an environmental protest" -- against an incinerator.

Yesterday, an alliance of state legislators and environmental groups in Minnesota foiled plans by the county and its incineration contractor to sneak through a 21% expansion of a local garbage incinerator as an "administrative amendment" to their permit. That contractor asking for the expansion is Covanta, the same company that operates Metro's Burnaby incinerator.

The MN Pollution Control Agency also cautioned Covanta they had better comply with the existing permit. Last week Covanta was fined by the state of New Jersey for violating air pollution control standards.

And yesterday in Scotland, "a number of senior politicians, experts and members of the public yesterday spent almost six hours berating Perth and Kinross Council planning officers over the 'catastrophic' decision to grant outline planning consent for a £100 million incinerator close to Perth town centre." (Courier, 25 November). As a result of their efforts, the incinerator plan is now considered "dead in the water."

Metro engineer Ken Carrusca and Surrey Councillor Marvin Hunt were scheduled to be speakers at a major conference on incineration held this week in Toronto, but their names suddenly disappeared from the agenda. They were supposed to talk about "mitigating negative public perception" of garbage incinerators.

Pic: Guardian, November 23, 2009

The future is of garbage is plastics.

Vancouver City Council signed on last week to the Greenest City Action Team's ambitious plan of cutting the city's waste by 40% in ten years.

What will our waste look like when we meet that goal? The biggest change is going to be a dramatic reduction in compostable organics.

Four Metro Vancouver pilot food scrap composting programs are already underway in smaller cities in the region, and the City of Vancouver is preparing to roll out the first phase of a city-wide composting program within weeks.

In addition to food scraps composting, both Metro Vancouver and the city are targeting wood and paper products for more aggressive recycling programs. The reduction of food, wood and paper products is going to change the composition of the region's waste.

A report presented to Vancouver City Council last March suggests that this will have a big impact on the GHG emissions of incinerators compared with landfills.

Currently a tonne of waste sent to the Vancouver landfill emits the equivalent of 382 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. Incinerating that waste, by comparison, emits only 336 kg of CO2 equivalent.

But in ten years, because of the change in the composition of our waste, the landfill will have lower GHG emissions than an incinerator. Because there will be less biodegradable material going to the landfill, there will be fewer methane emissions. The study estimates that the GHG emissions from a tonne of waste in 2020 will be reduced to 243 kg of CO2 equivalent.

The emissions from an incinerator burning that tonne of waste, on the other hand, will increase to 460 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent. Why is that?

Because when we get all those biodegradable organics out of our waste what's going to be left is a higher and higher proportion of non-recyclable plastics. (Remember, plastics are made from fossil fuels.)

One more reason to hold the order on waste incinerators.

Showdown coming: the people versus the "experts"

Metro Chair Lois Jackson is going way out on a dangerous limb.

In a half-page column in today's Vancouver Sun, Jackson casts her lot with a group of shadowy "experts" with ties to the incinerator industry -- and even, it seems, the tobacco industry.

In her column (probably penned by former Sun reporter Glenn Bohn, who is now part of the propaganda department at Metro Vancouver) Jackson trots out the same case for "why burning garbage is the best option" that was pitched at Metro's four forums earlier this month.

But the audiences at the forums weren't fooled. At every one of the four events, members of the audience stood up and complained to Chair Jackson that the panels were one-sided. All we were hearing was the case for incineration, people said. Why didn't Metro invite anyone to make the case against incineration?

Zero Waste BC distributed information sheets at the four events to make the case against incinerators and to expose the industry connections of the two "experts" that Metro flew in to convince us to accept incinerators in our communities.

Volunteers handed the Zero Waste information to as many members of the audience as we could reach. But, of course, Metro determines who sits at the front of the room -- and who gets half-page billing on the Op Ed page of the Vancouver Sun.

Later this month, Zero Waste Vancouver (an affiliate of Zero Waste BC) will be issuing an Alternative Plan for waste management in our region. We want to give Chair Jackson and the other political leaders in our region support in finding truly sustainable solutions that benefit the people of our region rather than big corporations from New Jersey.

Time running out Metro incinerator plan

Carlito Pablo suggests in the Georgia Straight that it's going to take a "long, hard campaign" to defeat Johnny Carline's incinerator plan for Metro Vancouver.

I think the truth is that time is running out for Metro's incinerator plan.

Metro had a chance to develop a good waste management plan that would be supported by the public and the region's municipalities -- but they have bungled it every step of the way. It's time to retire this plan and get a fresh start on the process.

The first task is to dispel the trumped-up panic that we are "running out of landfill space."

Why has no one challenged Carline's Chicken Little claims that we are about to be buried under a wall of waste? The fact is that we have plenty of capacity at the Vancouver landfill and the Burnaby incinerator to manage the waste we will produce when the Cache Creek landfill eventually closes (the date has already been pushed back from 2008 and now looms some time in the indefinite future).

If you look close, you see that Metro has been quietly waffling on the quantities of waste that we produce, revising the estimates downward and downward.

In the spring of 2008, it was 1.5 million tonnes (Strategy for Updating the Solid Waste Management Plan). In the spring of 2009, it was 1.26 million tonnes (AECOM report). Marvin Hunt was telling the audiences at the waste forums this week it was "one million tonnes." And then -- amazingly -- engineer Konrad Fichtner pegged the figure at "800,000 - 850,000 tonnes" in his public presentation in New Westminster yesterday.

To put those numbers in perspective: the Vancouver landfill is permitted to take 750,000 tonnes of garbage each year and the Burnaby incinerator another 290,00o tonnes. That's 1,040,000 million tonnes per year. The recently permitted expansion of the Cache Creek landfill gives us a bit of extra breathing room while we gradually reduce our waste as the public is demanding.

We are blessed to be in a comfortable position to stop talking about incinerators and get busy with the waste reduction measures that the public wants. And while we're at it, Metro's AECOM report provides good advice for immediate improvements to our landfills to reduce their environmental impacts until the day we can finally close them down.

Who will step up to the plate and show leadership here?

Kamloops Council rejects industrial incinerator

Incinerator developers, take note. One more community has mounted a successful defence against a proposal for "waste-to-energy."

This one happened in record time.

Citizens in the interior BC town of Kamloops (pop. 83,000) apparently got wind of a proposal to install an incinerator in their community on August 18th. It went down in a unanimous vote of disapproval by Kamloops City Council on September 1st.

The project had the Canadian Pacific Railway behind it -- the plant would get rid of their creosoted wood ties.

There was also the suggestion of support from First Nations people -- the proponent was called Aboriginal Cogeneration Corporation. First Nations are sharply divided on waste projects in this province, and this division is cynically exploited by opportunistic entrepreneurs.

But the community threw up an amazing website with a rich menu of actions to take -- and the community stood up and took action. Almost 200 people showed up at the City Council meeting on a couple days' notice.

Along with Christina Lake, Kamloops was a wake-up call for the incinerator industry and the governments who think waste-to-energy is our future. We want real economic development that builds our communities.

Congratulations, Kamloops!

Pic ~ Kamloops city website.

What does the Cache Creek landfill extension mean?

Once again the province has foiled Metro Vancouver's effort to expand its garbage empire.

Metro has been active for well over a decade trying to build huge new regional garbage disposal facilities, and now twice the province has intervened. It isn't at all clear what the province's motives are.

In June 2005 the EA process to approve the then-GVRD's Ashcroft Landfill was suddenly suspended by the Minister of Sustainable Resource Management George Abbott. GVRD had spent $4.5 million to purchase Ashcroft Ranch and a further $5.5 million on consultants and spin-doctors pushing the project forward.

The official spin on this decision was that the province didn't want to offend First Nations who opposed the project, but the Ministry's Brian Grant had advised in a 2003 letter to the EAO that this project was not approved under the region's 1995 Solid Waste Management Plan.

We were all surprised when Metro suddenly abandoned the Ashcroft project in early 2008 and announced it was planning to build incinerators instead.

No one was madder about that than the City of Vancouver and Wastech Services, who were running profitable landfills serving our region's needs. The City of Vancouver immediately commissioned Deloitte Touche to write a report on the financial impacts on the city if Metro shut down the Burns Bog landfill and Wastech has carried out a very effective behind-the-scenes information campaign against incineration.

A central plank in Metro's garbage empire strategy has been trumping up a "landfill crisis." The fear of being buried under a wall of garbage in 2010 drove the Metro Board to grudgingly approve exporting our surplus garbage to the USA until Metro's new disposal facilities were in place.

This past weekend Environment Minister Barry Penner hinted on CKNW that Wastech's Cache Creek landfill might not close next year as scheduled and yesterday Wastech announced that a 2-year extension of the landfill's permit has been approved by Penner's ministry.

Metro claims to be as furious about this development as they were when the province shut down the Ashcroft project. Speaking after Minister Penner on the CKNW radio show on Saturday, Metro Waste Committee Chair Marvin Hunt asked how the Ministry could reject Ashcroft on the grounds of First Nations objections while approving the Cache Creek extension -- pointing out that the First Nations are just as divided in their opinion about Cache Creek.

Point scored, but it won't win the game for Metro.

Unless what's really going on is some deeper collusion between Metro and the provincial government aimed around their shared vision of garbage-to-energy incineration.

Pic: card tricks

We can't build a new economy on dirty energy

Economic hard times create opportunities for the opportunistic. Governments are desperate to spend bundles of cash on "infrastructure" just to show their citizens that they're not standing idly by while the economy crashes.

This gets the attention of politically connected entrepreneurs like Rod Bryden, who was profiled in the Globe and Mail last weekend. Read all about his glitch-ridden Plasco gasification technology that will flourish as long as it can count on government capital grants, municipalities paying him to use their garbage as fuel and electric utilities paying premium rates for dirty energy.

And the BC Liberal government's Speech from the Throne this week was a full-barrelled commitment to subsidizing "alternative energy." The government promised to "use all the means at its disposal" to suport this industry.

Ominously, the Throne Speech also promised to "outlaw" export of waste from the province. Are they looking at garbage as the alternative fuel?

That was the proposal in proposed "clean and renewable energy" guidelines put out for comment this summer.
The responses were sharply divided between citizens (who said the government should not under any circumstances encourage the burning of waste for energy) and opportunists (the longest submission was a consescending sermon from Covanta, who are expanding their incineration empire into BC by buying the company that operates the Burnaby incinerator and pitching an additional project in Gold River).

Jeff Nagel reports that the garbage industry is deploying politically-connected lobbyists in Victoria to get access to our garbage. Metro Waste Committee Chair Marvin Hunt complained to The Tyee that he's been "flooded" with calls.

Who will get the government's ear? Not us, unless we begin flooding them with calls of our own.

Paul Connett Tuesday afternoon

If you're in town and want to relax with an interesting visitor next Tuesday afternoon, drop in to the SPEC Meeting Room. We'll have refreshments and a very stimulating discussion:

WHAT: briefing meeting for community activists to meet with a legendary environmental activist.

WHO: Dr. Paul Connett is a tenured professor of Chemistry from New York and Executive Director of the American Environmental Health Studies Project. During the 1980s and 1990s, Connett helped citizens across North America to block dozens of proposed waste incinerators. His Waste Not newsletter provided factual information to counter misinformation from incinerator salesmen.

Today, the incineration industry is on the march again, and Connett is responding by forming a new network to block the expansion of waste incineration and steer us on the road to Zero Waste.

WHERE: SPEC Meeting Room, 2150 Maple Street

WHEN: Tuesday, August 18, 2:00 pm

See you there!

Board of Trade speakers blast Metro study!

While I was away this summer the Vancouver Board of Trade convened a forum on Metro's waste situation. It can't have been a good day for Metro.

Both speakers sharply criticized the regional waste authority's current direction to build huge new waste incinerators. Economist Jeffrey Morris challenged Metro's assumptions about future waste volumes (Metro is basing its plan on a forecast of 75% recycling, while Morris says higher rates are possible).

Morris also stressed the need for the plan to include effective economic instruments to drive waste reduction, which will yield much better outcomes in the long run than infrastructure that competes against recycling (incinerators have to be fed...). See Morris's PPT here.

But most damning was the critique by accounting firm KPMG's Paul Levelton. He focused his remarks on the new study that Metro released last June (see the full AECOM Report here, or the Executive Summary here).

Levelton's presentation must have been humiliating not only for the report's authors (who include, incredibly, an appointed member of Metro's advisory panel on waste ~ talk about conflict of interest!) and also for the Metro employees who presumably reviewed and approved its release to the Board.

Levelton's presentation reads like the margin notes of a tough professor, pointing out elementary errors and omissions in a lazy student's work.

He opens with the statement: "a review of the recently released report by AECOM Metro Vancouver raises significant concerns that insufficient work has been done to make a decision on the future of waste management in the Lower Mainland, including an apparent preference for a waste to energy solution."

For instance, there's no financial risk analysis. There are no criteria for comparing different options. There is simply not enough information for the public to make meaningful comments or, most important, for political leaders to make informed decisions.

Levelton warned his audience that businesses in the region will bear more than half of the costs of Metro's ultimate scheme. He suggests ~ hopefully? ~ that there's still time for Metro to re-write the paper and get a passing grade.

Pic: Vancouver Board of Trade

We're all in this together

The people of Durham, Ontario, need our help. Despite months of hard work, their politicians continue to listen to the blandishments of the incinerator salesmen. Sign the community's petition today.

Pic: Durham Environment Watch

Expansion of garbage burning assailed

As the Recycling Council of BC gathers this weekend for its annual conference ~ and as four local politicians set off on their junket to visit Swedish incinerators ~ the problems with garbage burning are attracting public attention in the public media.

A story by Scott Simpson made the front page of the Vancouver Sun's business section this morning, reporting concerns of a local waste analyst who will speak at the RCBC conference. Monica Kosmak says the provincial government's misguided "Bioenergy" strategy is part of what is driving Metro Vancouver's incineration plan.

Zero Waste Vancouver's concerns about the Sweden junket also earned coverage in the local news this week.

At this week's joint meeting of the Metro Waste Management and Environment Committees, politicians received the findings from recent public consultations: over 80% of the respondents called for aggressive waste reduction efforts. Politicians spoke out for continuous improvement, beyond the 70% target proposed 15 months ago by their staff.

If we build the incinerators recommended by Metro staff, we'll be locked into feeding them.

Do we need new disposal facilities in the first place? Metro politicians were told waste has dropped 13% this year over last year due to the recession.

Metro politicians junket to Sweden to be "trained" in incineration

Vancouver Councillor Heather Deal will be one of four Metro politicians sent to Sweden next month to receive training in garbage incineration. This, despite the fact that her Vision Vancouver party took a position opposed to waste incineration in the November civic election.

Joining Deal will be West Van Mayor Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, Delta Councillor Scott Hamilton, and Surrey Councillor Linda Hepner, along with 12 other Canadian politicians, presumably from communities like Durham ON where the incinerator industry is trying to drum up business.

The proposal to send Metro politicians on this junket was introduced surreptitiously. It did not appear on the publicly posted agenda of the meeting where it was approved. It was slipped in as an "on-table" item and decided on the spot, without any public discussion.

The committee minutes published a month later (buried in the agenda package for the April committee meeting) suggest that some politicians had reservations about this junket. The minutes record that there was discussion of "whether the benefits of this intensive training is [sic] worth the cost."

Cost? There is no mention in the minutes of how much taxpayers will pay for this trip. It is sure to be higher than the $1500 approved approved a year ago by the Waste Management Committee for Surrey Councillor Marvin Hunt to buy a round of drinks at an incinerator open house in Paris last summer.

Benefits? Is it really the politicians' job to become "trained" in waste technologies? According to the Recycling Council of BC: "Joe Trasolini (Port Moody) said:
“We are poised to spend billions of dollars. Let us be informed.” Trasolini got his intensive training on a junket to Sweden several years ago with the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. He's been "pushing" (his word) garbage incineration ever since.

This is a junket, plain and simple. And one intended to push a waste incineration agenda.

If'we're going to send politicians on junkets, why not at least send them to Italy to learn from researcher Enzo Favoino how compost can turn agricultural soils into a carbon sink.

Waste incineration, on the other hand, encourages emission of GHGs, first to produce useless throw-away products and then to pump them up into the sky -- at taxpayer expense.

Pic: Flikr Jonathan Hill

Germany built too many incinerators ~ will we learn from their example?

Bulletin from Lukas Hammer of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB):

"A study commissioned by NABU reveals the increasing overcapacity of waste incineration inGermany. Today Germany is a net importer of waste due to the combination of declining amounts of national waste that is sent to incineration plants and a consistent expansion of incineration capacity.

At present, German incineration plants burn 2 million tons of waste which originate outsidethe country in order to maintain an economic workload at the incineration plants (=net imports). According to the study this overcapacity could grow to 8,6 tons by 2020. There are currently plans to construct 28 new waste incineration plants and to extend the capacity of 6 existing plants. This would add capacity of 5,5 million tons to Germany's oversized waste incineration infrastructure. Furthermore, the study shows that a significant number of German incineration plants are to be modernized or closed in the coming ten of fifteen years.

If stakeholders opt to build new and extend and modernize older plants, the waste incineration overcapacity couldreach 26%.

Such an overcapacity is likely to result in further imports for incineration or in increased incineration of recyclable waste. It risks undermining national efforts to follow a sustainable path of waste management (i.e. waste prevention, increased separate collection, recycling and re-use; implementation of Waste Framework Directive).

NABU is calling for a moratorium on extension of German incineration capacity and closure of older dispensable plants.

Instead, investments should be made to increase the recycling infrastructure.

The German example shows how crucial it is to take the right decisions today in order to follow a sustainable path of waste management. Once these inflexible and expensive incineration plants are set up, they will be used whatever waste need being burnt. Incineration plants -- technically as well as economically -- cannot run with just half of the work load. They will need to burn more waste which is generated through more exports or/and less separate collection and recycling.

You find the full study (in German) on the NABU website.

Pic: NABU

Cancer prevention group informs public in incinerator risks

Prevent Cancer Now, a Canadian organization focusing on the environmental causes of cancer, has launched a new web initiative to inform the public about the carcinogenic substances emitted by waste incinerators.

In an article in the current issue of Solid Waste and Recycling, PCN's incineration campaign coordinator Linda Gasser is quoted as saying: "Neither the politicians singing the praises of incineration, nor the consultants hired to lobby for or obtain approvals, are giving the public the information they need to assess the full impacts of incineration projects."

The PCN's incineration page offers background information and a petition.

Pic: Prevent Cancer Now

Newfoundland shuts down incinerators

There's a fresh wind blowing in from the East.

Solid Waste and Recycling magazine reports this month that Newfoundland is shutting down all of its waste incinerators in compliance with a Canada-wide Standard for Dioxins and Furans from Conical Waste Incinerators.

Amazingly, Newfoundland had 52 of these facilities. The first 29 are now decommissioned, with 23 to go...

Pic: The Western Star, December 8, 2008

Metro has been misleading the public about its incinerator plans

Tomorrow the new GVS&DD Board will consider a blockbuster report by the "Inquiry Officer" appointed to straighten out the fuss between Metro Vancouver and the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority over who gets the Canfor lands.

The two have been fighting over this plum piece of real estate in New Westminster, where Metro is determined ~ it is now on the official record ~ to build a waste-t0-energy incinerator using whatever means it can.

When the Port outbid Metro (offering to pay $10 million more than Metro's offer) Metro resorted to expropriation.

The Port called for an Inquiry into whether Metro was justified in using the "extraordinary and intrusive power" of expropriation.

The Officer appointed to look into the matter found that Metro had submitted conflicting testimony. GVS&DD Commissioner Johnny Carline had stated that Metro planned to build "primarily" a waste to energy incinerator, while Fred Nenninger, the manager in charge of utility planning, said Metro planned to build a whole "panoply" of waste facilities there.

But both admitted that Metro didn't really know for sure what it was going to build there. The Inquiry Officer, Bernd Walter, put it, mildly: “firm plans for all or any of these activities or facilities are not yet finalized, much less approved.”

Walter concluded his report with a recommendation that the GVS&DD go back to the drawing board and figure out what its "evolving plans" are before making a purchase decision.

My question: did anyone tell Marvin Hunt about this?

For months, Hunt has been busy shushing people who claim that Metro is planning to build incinerators. He has been saying that nothing is decided.

But this Inquiry Report makes it clear that Hunt and Carline and the Communications Department at Metro have been intentionally misleading the public. Indeed, we learn in the Report that the GVS&DD Board gave its authorization to go ahead with the purchase for that purpose.

They say justice is blind, but only if they pull the wool over her eyes.