The President’s Message
By Judith Grant
It’s been a long winter, and all of us are glad of the prospect of sunny pleasant weather and another summer at the beach. One benefit of all the snow is that the experts expect that all the melt water should have made its way into the Great Lakes basin by this July and have caused a modest rise in the level of the water. But the water levels situation is not simple, as the article on page 3 shows.
In the months since Thanksgiving, the “trailer park” proposed for the brow of the Nipissing Ridge in Concession 2 has been a continuing concern of FoTTSA. The final day of the hearing before the Ontario Municipal Board occurred on October 12, and the chair, N.C. Jackson, issued his decision on November 5.
Even before the final hearing day, our lawyer who appeared for us at several pre-hearing sessions, was successful in having the trailer park restricted to the “rural” half of the property. The “agricultural” half was preserved for farm activities, apart from an access road. Mr. Jackson gave the developer Donald Stubbs almost everything else he wanted, although he spelled out that the trailer park was not to disturb the deeryard on both rural and agricultural parts of his property when he plans his trailer park.
The proposed By-law and Official Plan Amendments forwarded to us in February made no reference to this requirement. FoTTSA therefore asked that the following be added to the list of items to be implemented in the site plan:
“Deer yard and migration issues, including restriction of human activity during the winter months, preservation of forest cover, restriction of construction of permanent structures and human activity in the area identified as deer yard in Broadfoot Consulting’s report of February 20, 2002”.
We’ll keep you posted about the outcome.
Have a splendid summer!
