The Dump issue tells you everything you need to know about decision making at City Hall.
Study this carefully. Look over here, not over there.
The Four Dump Options Outlined by Staff
(1) incineration at $497M–$862M,
(2) continuing to use the current Trail Road dump alongside a private facility,
(3) building a new municipal landfill at $439M–$761M, and
(4) purchasing the Taggart site for $95M plus closing costs.
The Next Best Alternative: Option 2 — Private Tipping Fees
The Taggart Miller site was going to be a landfill whether the city bought it or not — it already had all the necessary approvals. This is the critical fact.
The city's realistic next-best alternative wasn't building something new; it was simply not buying and instead paying per-tonne tipping fees to Taggart as a private operator.
Here's why that's the true BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement):
- No capital outlay. The city avoids a $95M+ upfront purchase.
- Flexibility. Tipping fees could be renegotiated or the city could split waste across multiple private facilities over time.
- Trail Road buys time. The current Trail Road landfill was near capacity, but it still had some remaining runway during which a longer-term strategy could have been developed.
Why the City Likely Rejected It
Mayor Sutcliffe argued that another solution might save taxpayers a few dollars a year for the next 10 years but cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars more in the long run. This is the classic "pay now vs. pay more later" argument — and over a 30-year lifespan, private tipping fees at commercial rates for 450,000 tonnes/year would almost certainly far exceed $95M. Taggart, knowing Ottawa had to go somewhere, would have been in a strong negotiating position on fees.
The Deeper Problem
I implicitly raised a governance issue: the city might have created its own landfill on city-owned land and obtained its own approvals — but that ship sailed long ago.
Taggart spent two decades and significant capital getting approvals, and that regulatory groundwork is itself a large part of what the $95M was buying.
Bottom Line
The next best alternative was paying private tipping fees to Taggart as an operator rather than as a landlord — but it would have handed Taggart enormous pricing leverage for decades.
Ottawa was maneuvered (willingly or not) into a position where purchasing was the only fiscally defensible choice, making this less a "great deal" and more, as A SAPRANO put it, an offer it couldn't refuse.
From a goverance perspective where was the staff on this???
What Staff Should Have Done
A city the size of Ottawa absolutely has — and had — the planning staff, engineers, and consultants to model long-range waste capacity.
Trail Road's finite lifespan was not a surprise. Taggart started accumulating land as far back as 2005, and if a private developer saw the opportunity two decades ago, city planners had the same data.
The window to secure city-owned land, begin environmental assessments, and pursue approvals independently was wide open in the mid-2000s.
Why It Didn't Happen — The Real Reasons
There are several compounding factors:
1. The Political Cycle Problem Waste planning operates on 20-30 year horizons. Municipal politicians operate on 4-year cycles. No councillor wins votes by spending capital today on a problem that won't bite until after they're gone. Staff recommendations on long-horizon infrastructure tend to get shelved, deferred, or underfunded when there's no political urgency.
2. NIMBY Siting any waste facility — landfill, incinerator, transfer station — triggers fierce community opposition.
Residents and local groups expressed concerns about secrecy, traffic (800 trucks daily), and environmental impacts on areas like Carlsbad Springs even for this purchase. Imagine the political cost of a city-led greenfield site selection process.
Staff who advance those files face years of public hearings, legal challenges, and angry constituents.
The path of least resistance is to wait.
3. The Approvals Gap
Taggart spent roughly two decades navigating approvals, with the permit changing as recently as May 2024 to include residential waste.
That regulatory journey
- environmental assessments,
- provincial permits,
- community consultations
is enormously expensive and time-consuming.
The city could have done this on public land, but it would have required sustained political will across at least four or five different councils. That kind of continuity almost never happens.
4. Staff Incentives and the "Crafted Estimates"
Question: Do staff estimates lead council to a predetermined decision?
When staff sense that leadership has a preferred outcome, analysis can be framed to support it not necessarily through dishonesty, but through the choice of what to compare, what costs to include, and what benefits to leave unstated.
Notice that options 1 and 3 had no benefits discussed, only costs, while option 4 had strong advocacy from the mayor.
5. The Closed-Door Problem The vote followed a closed-door council meeting, which limits the kind of independent scrutiny that might have surfaced better alternatives earlier.
Good long-range infrastructure planning needs public input. It creates accountability and surfaces options that internal staff processes miss.
Uncomfortable Conclusion
The city didn't "miss the boat" by accident. It missed it through a predictable combination of short-term political thinking,
bureaucratic risk-aversion, and the
near-impossibility of sustaining multi-decade infrastructure strategies across changing councils.
Taggart, as a private actor with a single long-term business goal and no electoral calendar to worry about, simply out-planned the city — and then sold them the result at a substantial premium.
As I noted, as a professional project manager, this was two decades in the works pretty good planning just not by the city pattern. Here's what's been shelved, deferred, or chronically underfunded in Ottawa over the past five years.
1. The Big Picture: An $11 Billion Infrastructure Hole
Provincial asset management rules required Ottawa to publicly report its infrastructure funding gap. The numbers are stark: over the next 10 years, Ottawa faces an $11 billion shortfall in funding required to maintain and replace aging assets. Council approved 5% annual water rate increases and additional borrowing to address a $4 billion gap in water and wastewater infrastructure but the remaining $7 billion, covering roads, parks, facilities and other assets, was simply deferred. The dump decision fits squarely within this pattern.
2. OC Transpo , Death by a Thousand Cuts
Transit has been the most visible casualty. Rather than investing to grow ridership, the city has repeatedly retreated:
OC Transpo projected a $35 million shortfall in fare revenue for 2024 due to post-pandemic ridership levels. Staff recommended fare hikes and service cuts, including aligning bus routes to "current ridership levels.
At the transit commission, councillors discussed digging into transit reserves, fare freezes, and possibly layoffs to fill a $50 million budget hole, a move the city's own chief financial officer acknowledged was "not sustainable."
3. Affordable Housing — Targets Set, Targets Missed
Councillors set a target of creating 500 new affordable housing units per year — but have not reached that goal even once. The city's own finance staff reported it will not meet its long-term housing targets without significant new support from higher levels of government, needing roughly an additional $155 million per year. The gap between stated priorities and actual funding is striking.
Much of Ottawa's infrastructure — roads, pipes, arenas, fire stations — was built in the 1960s and 70s and is now reaching end of life. For decades, the city did not set aside enough each year to properly maintain and replace these assets. The bill is now coming due. While Toronto responded to the same pressure with property tax increases of 9.5% in 2024, under Mayor Sutcliffe, Ottawa chose to delay rather than confront the remaining gap.
Perhaps most revealing is what did get funded. A mayoral candidate's commentary points out the priorities that crowded out long-term planning: Council chose to spend $500 million for Lansdowne to fix a broken Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group business model, $600 million for the Tewin subdivision that the Taggart Group wants to build, and $95 million for a dump site appraised at $23 million and originally purchased by Taggart for $8 million.
The Pattern
- Short-term affordability optics
- low tax increases,
- no hard decisions)
ARE consistently chosen over long-term fiscal responsibility.
Staff have repeatedly identified the gaps — on transit, housing, roads, water — and council has consistently deferred, trimmed, or ignored the recommendations that required political courage to implement.
The dump purchase is simply the most recent and visible consequence of that decades-long habit.I
peterkarwacki.overbrook@gmail.com
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