Niagara At Large

By Doug Draper

Will Niagara’s regional councillors finally decide to put the region on the road to building a transit system for the 21st century?
We may now be only weeks away from finding out?

Will public transit buses like this one in St. Catharines finally be rolling through every municipality in Niagara. Photo by Doug Draper

The region’s council is tentatively scheduled to hold a special meeting in late January or early February to review and vote on recommendations to build and operate a inter-municipal bus system for serving the entire Niagara region – a vision that has been championed by transit advocates, but never realized for the past 40 years of the regional government’s existence.
Now the momentum to turn that vision into a reality finally seems to be swinging in the right direction.

Niagara regional chairman Peter Partington declared in an address to council earlier this fall that he is making the creation of an inter-municipal transit system one of his major priorities as council enters the final year in 2010 of its four-year term. And survey after survey of Niagara residents over the past five to 10 years has shown support growing for a region-wide transit system.
But don’t take a “yes” vote for regional transit for granted. There are still nay Sayers out there and they are all too often the ones who will take the time to contact the 12 mayors and 18 directly elected regional councillors across Niagara before a final decision is made to let their views known.
That is why it is so important that all of you out there who support building a region-wide transit system that will start with buses but could, as we’ve seen in other southern Ontario regions, move to light rail, contact your mayors and regional councillors, and express your support for transit before possibly the most critical vote on this issue in four decades of regional government takes place.
To make it easier for you to contact your mayor and regional representatives by phone or email keep reading at the end of this sentence and scroll down to the end of this commentary.

(more…)

By Charles Lamb

Chemical Waste Management, the only commercial hazardous waste site in New York State,  will be full within four years and the company is making a heavily opposed  bid to New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation for a permit to expand the site.

Emergency crews respond four years ago to turned over tanker truck of toxic waste headed for the CWM site near Porter and Lewiston, N.Y. File Photo

If the permit is granted, CWM could continue to haul toxics here for another 40 years or so, bringing dangerous materials to a site near the Niagara River and Lake Ontario in the greater Niagara region from approximately 30 states.

Despite the fact that Lake Ontario already has PCBs in it from CWM’s site and other waste sites near the binational waters, and that every truck that brings toxics here passes schools and sometimes leak, and that the cancer rate for children for some kinds of cancer is higher near their site compared to others  in New York, CWM continues to push ahead hard for an expansion permit. (more…)