Municipal elections | The anaerobic digestion plant project sparks lively debates in Laval

The biogas plant project resurfaces in the municipal countryside in Laval. While the City has not yet found a bidder, a candidate for mayor estimates that he can save 80 million on the financial package. While “attractive”, his calculation is however “simplistic”, retort his opponents.

Henri Ouellette-Vézina
Press

“From the beginning, this file, it rings false in my ears”, loose the leader of the Laval Citoyens party and candidate for mayor Michel Poissant, in an interview with Press.

He affirms that the Laval biomethanization project will take care of 80,000 tonnes of residual materials, but that only the residential composting side will be the subject of a subsidy, estimated at around 60 million. “We are talking about an estimated cost of 200 million, so with a subsidy of 60 million, the cost for Laval residents would be 140 million,” he observes.

There are other solutions, says Mr. Poissant, who wants to build on a partnership with a mixed economy company as was done in Varennes with the Mixed Economy Company of the East of the South Crown (SEMECS ).

With this model, Poissant estimates that the net cost would instead be 120 million, while the government subsidy of 60 million would remain unchanged.

The net cost of the plant to taxpayers would then be $ 60 million, or $ 80 million less, says Poissant. He promises to invest these millions more in the protection of natural environments, social housing and the fight against homelessness.

However, for the head of the Laval movement and candidate for mayor Stéphane Boyer, the intervention of Mr. Poissant shows precisely that “he does not control the file”. “The anaerobic digestion plant does not aim to treat 80,000 tonnes of residual materials at a cost of 200 million. Rather, it aims to treat 145,000 tonnes of municipal waste and sludge for 200 million. We cannot therefore directly compare the price of the Laval plant to that of the Varennes plant, ”he assures us from the outset.

“Too simplistic”

For the outgoing leader of the official opposition and leader of the Laval Party, Michel Trottier, the calculation made by Mr. Poissant is “attractive, but obviously much too simplistic”, because it does not take into account “the Laval situation”.

According to Mr. Trottier, questions arise “when we integrate elements of profitability specific to private enterprise in a context of residual materials management”. “It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but [on doit avoir] the rigor of analyzing in depth and weighing the pros and cons before taking a position on an issue, if applicable, the potentially most important contract to ever be awarded by the City of Laval ”, he insists again .

The two men still agree on one thing: the biogas plant project demonstrates “the inability of the Demers-Boyer administration to carry out its ideas of greatness”.

Stéphane Boyer recalls that the Demers administration, of which he is the successor, “has already carried out a study which concluded that a partnership with the private sector would be less expensive in the short term, but more expensive for the operating costs of the factory “.

“Another element that Mr. Poissant evades is that the Laval business model is based on the generation of income through two sources. First, by the production and sale of natural gas, then, by the construction of an infrastructure that will be able to accommodate materials from other nearby cities, ”said Stéphane Boyer, who recalls that his administration has the intention to “keep all carbon credits linked to the plant” to achieve carbon neutral status.

As for the absence of bidders, Mr. Boyer justifies it by the fact that the project “arrives at a time of overheating of the construction market with a shortage of labor and a significant increase in the costs of materials”. “A first call for tenders had to be canceled due to the absence of bidders. The City is currently working on ways to make modifications to the project in order to carry out a new call for tenders. The experts are already at work, ”he concludes.

Sophie Trottier’s Action Laval team did not respond to our questions about the biogas plant project when it was called upon to respond. The party had argued last summer that it was “inconceivable that the third largest city in Quebec is unable to manage an environmental project”.