Council OKs grants for turkey packaging plant pledging 50 jobs
A plan to build an $8.1-million turkey packaging plant in Windsor and create 50 jobs was assailed Monday by a group of activists warning of environmental degradation, animal cruelty and increasing violent crime and drug abuse in the community.
The spokesman for Belwood Poultry left the city council meeting — where council strongly approved an incentive plan worth $821,420 in property tax savings over 10 years — somewhat startled by the unexpected attacks.
“What we are excited about is investing in the community, creating jobs for the short and long term, so we were quite surprised,” said Ben Schlegel, a spokesman for the Schlegel family company. He told council that, contrary to the activists’ talk about the negative impacts of slaughterhouses, there will be no handling of live animals at the new facility, located in the 1500 block of Mercer Street. It will be a packaging plant where slaughtered turkeys will arrive much as they appear in the grocery store, and be cut up into packaged products like turkey breasts, wings and drumsticks, for the Canadian and U.S. markets.
He said Belwood intends to build “a facility the community can be proud of,” starting this year. All products moving in and out will come via refrigerated trailers, said Schlegel, who said the plant will be “clean, quiet and an enhancement to the community.”
But Nicole Rivers from Direct Action Everywhere said these kinds of processing plants have a “disastrous effect” on land, air and water quality.
“Constructing this plant may create a few jobs, but at what cost,” she asked councillors, citing odours, blood, gore and bacteria coming from the plant that will “wreak havoc on local ecosystems,” add antibiotics (administered to the turkeys) to the environment and potentially lead to the creation of deadly antibiotic-resistant superbugs.
Another objector, Windsor resident Varun Joshi, referred to the impact of slaughterhouses, though these turkeys would be slaughtered elsewhere. He said there’s research showing higher crime and drug abuse rates in communities with slaughterhouses, because they’re affected by continually killing animals that feel pain and form bonds with humans.
“The benefits of more employment become redundant when those that initially benefit become subject to weakened mental health, weaker collective bargaining rights and vulnerability to the brutalization effect,” he said.
But while Coun. Bill Marra acknowledged the speakers’ intelligent and well-researched presentations, he told them they came to the wrong place. The processing plant is allowed under the property’s current zoning and could start operating there tomorrow, he said. What council was deciding Monday was whether the company qualifies for the city’s community improvement plan that rebates firms the extra municipal taxes they pay when they expand or build on a property and create jobs.
For Belwood, the taxes will go from $5,905 currently, to $88,047 once the 30,000-square-foot packaging plant is built. So it stands to receive $82,142 a year for 10 years. Schlegel said the incentives available under the plan “is a difference maker that tips the scale in favour of locating in Windsor.”
The 4.5-acre site in the 1500 block of Mercer Street, between Howard Avenue and McDougall Street, is currently the home of a three-storey, 52,000-square-foot building that’s served as a massive freezer for 100 years, initially for storing ice, then as a curling club, and for the last 30 years as a warehouse. The Schlegels bought the Windsor Freezer Services property in 2016, with plans to make improvements to the old building and keep it for storage, plus build the new packaging operation.
The plant will get turkeys from Belwood’s processing plant in Amherstburg, which gets them from family farms in the Wingham area.