PORT HOPE — The material dredged out of Port Hope’s harbour each year is undeniably clean and reports prove it, says municipal Chief Administrative Officer Eugene Todd.

Frustrated with being held to a different standard of sediment and soil testing, Mr. Todd plans to take the province to task on the issue that wastes times, costs money — particularly this year’s harbour dredge that took nearly two months from start to finish — closing not only the harbour to boaters, but the public beach to bathers.

“None of this material has any type of contamination that is of any risk to any individual,” he said, discussing the issue with Port Hope council recently.

According to a report by the International Joint Commission (IJC), an independent binational organization established by the United States and Canada under the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, the Port Hope harbour is one of the 43 Areas of Concern (AOCs). It has been deemed such due to past practices and contamination confined to the turning basin and a portion of the west slip where an estimated 90,000 cubic metres of sediments and fine sands make a uniform layer — three metres thick and about three metres beneath the water — made up of uranium, thorium, radioactive lead, and heavy metal, iron, zinc, and copper), as well as PCBs.

A heavy metal soup like that, Mr. Todd pointed out, doesn’t move.

Port Hope dredges where the harbour and the Ganaraska River meet and from the nearshore zone of Lake Ontario, explained Mr. Todd, “quite a distance” from the contaminated zone.

“Basically the tests have always been clean,” he said. “I think that’s going to be our ammunition with the MOE (Ministry of the Environment).”

While the practice of dredging has always included taking sediment samples prior to moving the material, the process typically moves along fairly quickly.

However, it’s taken much longer this year because of where the material was coming from and where it was going, according to MOE spokesman Jim Martheius.

Rather than dispose of the material, which has been the norm in Port Hope, the municipality proposed moving 5,000 cubic metres to the east beach which involves a whole other round of testing: this time it’s soil, as opposed to sediment.

“The municipality provided a 2010 proposal to put it on a public beach,” he said. “Normally they bring it for disposal.”

That said, the ministry is open to ideas.

“If the municipality wants to propose changes, the ministry is happy to comment,” Mr. Martheius told the News this week. “It might not mean no testing, but it could mean that testing is scaled-down. It’s basically a due diligence exercise for them.”

The length of time involved in the testing of soils depends on whether or not the municipality requested a priority analysis — which costs more — and on the amount of material involved.

Mr. Todd is currently working on a plan to itemize test results of the past 20 years to show the material has never shown levels of contamination above regulatory limits.