PelhamToday received the following letter to the editor regarding development in Wainfleet:
Over 40 years ago a young couple, he Canadian, she American, found their dream home in the Municipality of Wainfleet, southern Ontario, close to the Lake Erie shoreline. I’m sure they faced problems, as every good marriage does, but nothing to shake their enduring love for their home, their forever home.
When the property surrounding their home became a Sick Kids Camp, giving many disadvantaged children, with severe health issues, the opportunity to come to the camp and enjoy summer holidays in a natural rural environment few had ever experienced before, this local couple were among the first to volunteer their time to make sure each youngster had the very best time they could.
Sadly, the organization running this camp also had other camps and there came a time when economic constraints made them choose to close and sell off this particular site.
The immediate response, from the council at the time, was to seek assistance and funding to buy the property to ensure it remained unspoiled, and a natural, environmentally protected area that all future residents could have access to and enjoy.
Unfortunately, the local council was outbid by a developer.
This was around 20 years ago, and also coincided with Niagara Region’s Public Health Chief Medical Officer of Health issuing a report stating that due to “30 years of bad planning,” along Wainfleet’s Lake Erie shoreline, and too many failing septic systems and individual, sub-standard, water supply systems, the CMOH was recommending that municipal water and sewer services should be extended from Port Colborne along the entire Wainfleet Lake Erie shoreline and to around 600 metres inland from the shoreline.
The CMOH initiated a series of public meetings and advisory committees with residents appointed were brought in who had frequent meetings with Regional planners and public health staff. It brought some lively debate with the greatest sticking point being the sheer cost to every resident who would be mandated to connect to municipal services as soon as they were in place.
At a subsequent municipal election a council was elected whose first item of business was to bring the Regionally proposed Wainfleet Municipal Sewer and Water Servicing Plan to a council meeting agenda. In a unanimous vote, Wainfleet council rejected it. Neither upper tier governments, provincial nor regional ever questioned that decision, although a Boiled Water Advisory, imposed by the then- CMOH, remains in place today along the entire Wainfleet Lake Erie shoreline.
Note: This proposed Regional Municipal Servicing Plan was to be a “full cost recovery plan” meaning that any new development, single family residence, or higher density developments, had no option but to connect with the municipal services.
Coincidentally, whilst this process was taking place, over a few years, not just months, the developers who had bought the Lakewood site submitted a planning application for a 50-unit-plus condominium, with a communal, shared septic system and potable water system.
No different from today, such an application, in such a rural and environmentally sensitive area, conflicted with entire existing provincial policies on rural lands, the Regional planning policies, and Wainfleet’s own Official Plan and Zoning Bylaw. Yet the council of the day, on the recommendation of their planning staff, approved it.
And so this bad planning has continued, spasmodically, up until today, in spite of ongoing and frequent opposition from groups of local residents whose concerns have all been summarily ignored by both council and planning staff.
The most recent approval, at a public meeting, resulted in a 3 to 2 vote to approve the application subject to 61 conditions. The planning consultant, recommending that council should approve it, also admitted it did not meet planning policy. The Township’s newly appointed planner also recommended approving it, yet issued a public statement a week later, “...if this application came up before us today it would not be approved because it does not meet policy…”
And now it has arrived: the previous Wainfleet council voted to approve the planning application and blindly accepted that the 61 conditions had all been met.
In actual fact those conditions had all been put into one neat file by that same planner who had already publicly admitted that this development “…did not meet policy…”
Far from being satisfied, many had not been and too many were to be satisfied by the developer as construction went on.
Municipal terrorism? Imagine this if you can.
That young couple of 40 years ago are awoken early every weekday morning by heavy, industrial machinery, they wake to a desolation surrounding them that resembles a war zone. There is no respite except briefly at weekends, when all they have to look forward to is another week of misery. They have two dogs, no longer young, but a part of their family. They used to enjoy time in their outside run, and were happy. Now they won’t go outside unless they have to. They are terrified, even inside their home.
The vibration caused by the heavy industrial machines creates dust inside the home, it causes family trinkets and memories, carefully placed on shelves to fall. There is no one to explain to them what will happen if their 40-year, once happy, family home, suffers structural damage, because the developer was never held to his obligation to carry out a proper structural survey before the destruction began.
They no longer wonder why practically every one of their near neighbours now have For Sale signs on their properties. Whilst those neighbours already know their property values have shrunk, this one home knows all too well that their once forever home may be unsaleable.
If that isn’t terrorism in communities that only pretend to be caring, I really can’t think of any other way to describe it.
And sadly, it actually gets worse.
This totally inappropriate condominium, that meets no minimum planning requirements to ever have been approved, has been recommended by every planning staff and approved by every council it has ever come before. The fact that a multitude of residents, past and present, have opposed it has never actually mattered.
And now, this present council, supported by their entire staff, have chosen that their best option is to just refuse to even answer any request from a Wainfleet resident, who has paid property taxes for 40 years, to address her concerns because her home is being destroyed.
This is by far the greatest betrayal of all. By an elected council who don’t care about the lives of families and their homes in their communities being destroyed, and by planning staff who act as if they are paid-up members of Ontario’s development lobby.
Andrew Watts
Wainfleet
