RADVILLE, Sask. – Many rural municipalities have no control over industrial development within their borders and don’t realize it, say some south Saskatchewan residents.
“It’s amazing, it really stunned us,” said Garry Lafrentz, a farmer who has led a campaign against a waste disposal plant proposed for Bienfait.
He said local people did not know that because they did not have a zoning bylaw in place, a company could come in, buy land and put it to any use so long as it had provincial approval. No local approval is necessary.
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“You feel like you’re in this RM, you’re a part of the RM, your family’s been here for generations,” so you should have some say over local industrial development. “But without these bylaws you have no authority over anything,” he said.
Environmental assessment
Plains Environmental Inc., an Estevan-based company, has proposed a waste burning and storage facility for the Bienfait area. It would incinerate material from local oilfield activity, as well as treat biomedical waste and other materials. Some treated materials would be stored at the site.
The company is completing its own environmental assessment of a site near Bienfait, about 20 kilometres east of Estevan. This will be given to the provincial environment department, which will review it, along with other government departments, and decide whether to approve it.
But the RM of Coalfields, which contains the proposed site, has passed interim development control, which Lafrentz, the new reeve, said gives the RM power to refuse the proposed plant, even if it passes the environmental assessment.
During the interim period, any project involving land use within the RM requires a permit from the council.
But Plains Environmental Inc. president Bob Lawrence said if the local municipal council does not give it a permit to build the plant, it would not necessarily kill the Bienfait project.
He said the company had “options” in the case of a refusal, but would not say what those were. “I’m not going to talk about the legalities of it,” he said.
Setting neighbor against neighbor is something Radville-area farmer Barry Larsen wants to prevent. Plains Environmental is also rumored to be considering the RM of Lake Alma, just south of Radville, as a possible back-up site for a waste plant.
Larsen, who is against any waste plant situated near agricultural land, has helped organize another chapter of Waste Busters, an offshoot of a group set up in Bienfait, but he said he thinks by acting fast, the social damage that occurred in Bienfait can be avoided.
More will adopt rules
About 40 percent of Saskatchewan’s RMs don’t have zoning bylaws now, said Daryl Chambers, executive director of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities. But he thinks that most will adopt them in the next 15 years.
“As environmental issues get bigger and bigger, eventually all municipalities will be in a situation where they have zoning bylaws,” he said.
As industry moves into rural areas at a greater rate than before, the need for RMs to have these zoning bylaws is becoming greater, he said.
