Terminal failure

It is hard to see how Mayor Ferguson and a handful of council members could have managed things worse—how they twisted a moderately challenging issue into a pure fiasco. We tend not to see public inquiries in local politics, but if municipal leadership ever warranted third-party scrutiny, it is around the Picton Terminals’ settlement. There are lessons here.

Steve Ferguson managed COVID well. He was visible, clear and reassuring. Sitting on the corner of his desk, he regularly spoke to a nervous community— even as the municipality and other levels of government imposed ever tougher restrictions. Then, the vaccines came along, and Shire Hall performed an important and efficient role in putting jabs in arms.

That seems so long ago.

There are many reasons not to like Picton Terminals. It has been a bad neighbour, an inattentive operator, and has exploited this property for its exclusive benefit. The list of sins is long. Early in their tenure, poor containment of petroleum coke stored on site resulted in thick black soot wafting clouds over neighbouring homes and farms, coating everything with grime. At about this time, PT’s owners began blasting away a wide swath of the cliff face on the water’s edge, making room for two large cranes to facilitate loading and unloading. Materials meant to be stored on-site often ended up in the bay or the groundwater. In 2017, a barge hauling wind turbine parts to Amherst Island sank at the dock facility—dumping fuel into the water and contaminating the water source for the town of Picton for weeks.

Meanwhile, the economic benefits to this community have been marginal—particularly when one nets out the impact on County Road 49.

Picton Terminals has been a poor corporate citizen.

Yet, it has rights. Rights may not be easily diminished or removed. For good reason. Property rights are in place to protect every property owner. The municipality cannot simply wave away property rights or reduce them—as some residents wish it could do. It cannot limit these rights retroactively.

Picton Terminals operates a docking facility on Picton Bay. This facility was built—with Canadian government funds—in 1953. An ore train of 30 to 35 cars rolled through the County daily hauling iron ore from the Marmaraton Mine to be loaded onto ships, traversing Lake Ontario to Lackawanna and onto the Bethlehem steel mills in the US.

The right to use this facility as a port was not extinguished when the last ship laden with iron ore sailed away. Nor in the decades since. So when the Doornekamp family acquired the property in the middle of the previous decade, it came with the right to operate it as a port.

Mayor Ferguson and council members know this. They would have known this before their legal advisors explained the facts. Repeatedly. In ever more direct language. They will have explained that the federal government governs the waterway. And that the province regulates the environment, groundwater and such.

The municipality simply doesn’t have the tools or levers to do what residents wish— which is to curtail or stop Picton Terminals from operating or expanding as a port facility. It is not in Council’s power to retroactively diminish property rights.

At this point, few will be persuaded by this explanation. (And there is much nuance skimmed over for brevity.) Nevertheless, the fault for this debacle lies with Mayor Ferguson and the councillors who actively sold false hope these past few months. They cynically rode a wave of public outrage, unable or unwilling to explain the difficult facts to those who endure the impact of this facility.

Somewhere along the way, Mayor Ferguson and a handful of councillors appear to have calculated that it was better to go along with the rage rather than tell the truth. There were no easy answers. And they likely feared the answers they had would make them look weak. So, they went along.

They chose to use taxpayer dollars to prolong a futile dispute—likely incurring hundreds of thousands in legal fees along the way—because they weren’t strong enough to say the hard part out loud.

The peculiar irony is that the municipality has tools today to manage what happens on the Picton Terminals site—by way of this settlement—that it didn’t have last week. It has the means to manage better what happens on this site—levers it likely would not have had if they’d dragged this matter through a courtroom. The municipality is in a better place today because of this deal, but no one will believe it. Or believe it sufficient. And they may be right about that. But it was never in Shire Hall’s power to make it so.

The deal is likely of little solace to those folks who have to live with Picton Terminals as a daily irritant. And readers will rightly feel angry about this outcome.

But it didn’t have to be this way. Mayor Ferguson, Councillor John Hirsch, and others had a duty to get out in front of this issue months ago—explaining the facts on the ground. They had a responsibility to spell out the pros and cons of prolonging this futile and misplaced fight.

Better leadership would have stood up and explained to rooms full of angry people that while they agreed with their frustration, their fight properly belonged at Queen’s Park and Ottawa. Leadership would have explained that a settlement was the best possible result— among an array of bad outcomes.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca