Hamilton Conservation Authority rejects controversial bid to bulldoze Ancaster wetland
Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash
Hamilton Conservation Authority directors have rejected a developer’s controversial bid for a permit to bulldoze a wetland by the headwaters to Ancaster Creek to make way for a massive warehouse complex. - Richard Leitner/Metroland
Hamilton Conservation Authority directors have rejected a developer’s controversial bid for a permit to bulldoze a wetland by the headwaters to Ancaster Creek to make way for a massive warehouse complex.
“The board after considerable deliberation decided to deny the application and the hearing is now adjourned,” authority chair Lloyd Ferguson announced without elaboration after directors emerged from an hour-and-a-half closed session at their June 3 meeting.
Their ruling capped nearly five hours of delegations and a formal permit hearing that ended shortly before midnight.
Authority staff recommended rejection of the plan, which promised to create a new and slightly bigger wetland beside the proposed 1.3-million-square-foot warehouse complex at 140 Garner Rd. East.
But opposition was also fierce from seven delegated speakers, a coalition of local environmental groups and in 133 written submissions from citizens, a coalition of churches, scientists and two former authority chairs.
“This is the Rubicon; don’t cross it,” environmental activist Don McLean urged directors, arguing approval would set a dangerous precedent and cost the authority public support, including in land and money donations.
“The developer is seeking a permit to destroy a wetland and parts of the headwaters of Ancaster Creek, (and) pretty it up by calling it a relocation,” he said.
“It will open up the floodgates and make wetlands and headwater streams a development target across the HCA watersheds and beyond. You will hear no end of this precedent.”
Summer Thomas, a 19-year-old ecology student, said the area is home to many birds, bats, snakes, amphibians and other wildlife, some endangered or threatened.
She said Ontario has already lost 72 per cent of its wetlands, which absorb carbon dioxide, helping mitigate “the climate crisis.”
“It is decisions like this that chip away at chances of avoiding the planet’s incoming sixth mass extinction,” Thomas said.
But Sergio Manchia, lead consultant for applicant One Properties Real Estate Inc. of Toronto, rejected that the plan would set a precedent, even disputing the 1.8-hectare wetland’s existence.
He said it wasn’t identified in city planning studies for the area, part of the airport employment growth district, suggesting it is “a wet area” and not the locally significant wetland identified by authority staff.
“There is no provincially significant wetland and there is no local wetland,” Manchia said of the city studies. “There is notification of a watercourse, which again we are requesting to shift, but certainly not eliminate, and enhance.”
Ken Glasbergen, ecological consultant for One Properties, acknowledged the wetland is locally significant, but said it is of “low quality” and being degraded by invasive phragmites that will eventually overtake its cattails.
Removing the phragmites requires excavation, he said, offering “good reason” to create a new wetland about 70 metres to the east, where a 14-metre setback from Highway 6 will provide a green corridor to woodlands to the south.
Glasbergen said the new 1.95-hectare wetland would be a series of “open water features” connected by a short channel.
“The open water will allow for the establishment of amphibian and reptile habitat, which is currently missing,” he said — an assertion contradicted by neighbours.
But Scott Peck, who oversees the authority’s watershed planning and engineering, said the plan isn’t allowed by existing regulations, which require a 30-metre buffer between development and wetlands.
He said he isn’t convinced a marginally bigger “wetland in a rectangular box” is an improvement and the proposed ponds may have the undesired effect of warming Ancaster Creek.
Peck said although the authority will consider enacting a natural offsetting policy this fall to allow wetland relocations as a last resort, he’d expect it to require the ecological compensation to be two to three times what is lost.
He said the Ancaster wetland was identified in an environmental impact study for a 2018 subdivision plan by a previous landowner that proposed to protect it.
“It is a wetland and it is regulated by the HCA.”
