At a special meeting held on Wednesday, Ottawa City Council gathered for the first time in 2026 to proceed with the purchase of the Capital Region Resource Recovery Centre.
Although most of the meeting was closed to the public, councillors and Mayor Mark Sutcliffe emerged about two hours later to publicly vote on a motion to delegate authority to the city manager to negotiate, enter into, finalize, and execute an asset purchase agreement of the landfill property located in Ottawa’s Carlsbad Springs community.
“I want to remind everyone that we are not deciding today whether this site will be a landfill,” emphasized Mayor Mark Sutcliffe. “The future use of the site has already been decided. It is a provincially approved landfill, it will operate as a provincially approved landfill.”
Indeed, Taggart Miller Environmental Services completed the environmental assessment process in May 2025. Sutcliffe underscored that the decision being made at this meeting was really about who would be in charge of the landfill’s management.
“The question is whether it will operate as a publicly owned or privately owned provincially approved landfill; whether it will be owned by the people of Ottawa or the residents of another municipality or a private corporation,” he said. “If we don’t own it, someone else will.”
In a recorded vote, 19 councillors and the mayor voted in favour of the motion, with five councillors dissenting (Osgoode Coun. Isabelle Skalski, Orléans South-Navan Coun. Catherine Kitts, West Carleton-March Coun. Clarke Kelly, Rideau-Jock Coun. David Brown, and Orléans East-Cumberland Coun. Matthew Luloff).
During the media availability after the meeting, questions surrounding the fundamental meaning of the motion were raised. Will the City of Ottawa own the Recovery Centre or not?
“Staff now have the authority to proceed with a purchase,” clarified Sutcliffe. “But obviously there are details to be worked out, and we can’t say with 100 per cent certainty that the transaction will be completed.”
City staff confirmed that nothing seems to be holding back the purchase. “All of the conditions have been met, so there’s no impediment moving forward.”
Although most questions could not be answered concretely due to confidentiality under the non-disclosure agreement, City staff explained that the landfill would be paid for through debt.
“When the report becomes public, we will be sharing the details related to that. . . The expenses that we’re looking at now are really advancing expenses that we had anticipated at some point in the future,” city staff explained, referring to the Solid Waste Master Plan.
“This fits within the envelope of funding that we had identified for future expenditures on solid waste management,” added Sutcliffe.
“If there’s a silver lining to this, despite the fact that [residents] will have concerns and worries, it’s that their elected officials, the people who represent them at City Hall, will have control over the decisions that are made about this site going forward,” concluded Sutcliffe. “In a scenario where it’s owned by a private company or another municipality, they would not have that accountability in the form of their elected officials being responsible to them on the future decisions that are made.”
