May 16th 2006 presentation
to the joint committee of the Corporate Services and Economic Development
Committee and the Transportation Committee of the City of Ottawa.
I would like to start by saying that
I have been involved in focus groups, working groups and consultations
in Ottawa for over 20 years.
This PWG was in my view top-down, talk-down,
an insult to the members of the public involved, and easily the worst
public consultation process I have ever participated in. The 4-hour
meetings were once and sometimes twice weekly (8 meetings in all, including
one all-day session). The meetings plus travel time, and reading documents,
writing and emailing, and site visits in between represented a considerable
commitment of our time.
I was asked to represent the City of
Ottawa’s Environmental Advisory Committee (EAC) on this PWG, and with
EAC’s blessing I declined to continue after the 4th meeting
with what I considered to be a sham, and an exercise whose sole purpose
was to meet the City’s public consultation requirements. It was obvious
to me and to other members of the group that staff favoured Bowesville
from day one and that they were not going to accept the decision of
the PWG. We were regularly misquoted in the minutes, and our input was
often omitted. We were therefore compelled to note our own comments
and input during meetings so that we could have corrections to the minutes
made. This process was not only an insult to the participating members
of the community, but also in my view a disgrace to the City.
From the first PWG meeting, large maps
of the Walkley, Lester and Bowesville sites with the superimposed footprint
of the maintenance yard were posted on the walls at every meeting. We
soon discovered that the footprint on the Walkley rail yard was 2.3
times the size of the others. Since this exaggerated footprint size
overlapped a greenspace precious to the Fairlea and Heatherington communities
it seemed that this oversized footprint was designed to generate local
community opposition to Walkley.
Walkley is the only location for the
LRT yard that was cited in the MOU negotiated by the City with the provincial
and federal governments. Walkley is a brownfield and has more than enough
space to accommodate the LRT yard. The two greenfields – Lester and
Bowesville, were not included in the MOU.
The biodiversity inventory was done in
late October, and the results are largely guesswork because there is
little biodiversity evident at this time of year.
At the last meeting I attended, one member
of the group produced an armful of ribbons from mature trees that had
been marked for felling at the Bowesville location. Altogether, over
150 trees had been marked. This was before the request to Council to
include the Bowesville site had been approved, before the PWG had made
a decision, and before the final decision on the LRT yard had been made
by Council.
This LRT project is supposed to be “green”
– green transportation – so it should not be in the business of
bulldozing greenfields along its route, particularly when there is a
perfectly acceptable and environmentally-appropriate brownfield option
at Walkley.
The PWG’s job was to assess all the
options and make their recommendation.
After many weeks of meetings, site visits
by members of the group, the involvement of botanical experts who performed
a proper biodiversity inventory, the PWG voted overwhelmingly for the
Walkley location. This recommendation is both well-considered and well-researched
EAC has unanimously passed a motion to
Council which supports the PWG’s recommendation. The Ottawa Forest
and Greenspace Advisory Committee also supports the PWG’s recommendation.
In closing, I would like to add that
decisions such as this should take the extremely serious threats of
global climate change into consideration.
A four-year United Nations study of ecosystem
health that involved scientists from every country has shown that every
ecosystem on Earth has been damaged by human activity. The scientists
have estimated that unless serious action is taken, we could well lose
50% of the world’s species by 2050. That’s in 44 years time! Our
own Polar Bear is likely to become extinct by the end of this century.
Every village, town and city on Earth
is building out and destroying greenspace, and therefore biodiversity.
We currently lose over three acres of greenspace a day in Ottawa alone.
Every greenspace we pave, every tree
we cut down, and every wetland we ruin is reducing our city’s carbon
sink lands, and contributing to climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
I strongly urge you to vote for locating
the LRT yard on the Walkley brownfield site, and for preventing the
Bowesville greenfield from becoming a brownfield. We already have one
brownfield on the LRT route - let’s use it and not make two.
Ann Coffey, Member
City of Ottawa Environmental Advisory
Committee
Phone: 746-8668
Email: harbour@magma.ca