A high-powered and high-dollared political battle in City Hall is playing out largely unnoticed by local media. At stake are potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in suburban development and the future of a proposed wilderness park celebrated as an unparallelled urban gem by environmentalists.
Over the past few years wilderness advocates have successfully convinced the provincial government to designate 1,350 hectares of crown land as the Birch Cove-Blue Mountain Wilderness, and managed to get a similarly named municipal wilderness park written into the HRM regional plan; the city park would incorporate both the crown land and now-privately held land bound by the Bayers Lake Industrial Park, the proposed Highway 113 corridor, the Kingswood subdivision in Hammond’s Plains and a ridgeline just to the west of the Bicentennial Highway. The resulting park would include nine lakes that form a continuous canoe loop, the highlands of Blue Mountain and a striking wilderness landscape—all on a chunk of land about the size of the Halifax peninsula, just 15 minutes from downtown.
The regional plan calls for the creation of the park and says the privately owned land can’t be developed in the 25-year lifetime of the plan. But the private landowners—which include the two largest development companies in Nova Scotia, the Annapolis Group and Armco Development—have asked the Regional Plan Advisory Committee to amend the plan to allow them to place suburban homes on the land. The developers have been lobbying hard on the issue, and through two meetings of perhaps 50 people crammed into the un-air conditioned Finley Centre, the committee has been fairly responsive. While applying political pressure, the developers have put up “no trespassing” signs and blocked parking on formerly accessible lots off the BiHi. The committee continues its deliberation August 11; see here and here for more information, and I’ll follow up in this space as the meeting approaches.
This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2010.
So the developers have placed “no trespassing”signs and blocked access to a property they do not own?
On their own property, which people have been using for centuries without restriction.
They probably have the right to do that (not sure how courts in Canada rule on historic use), but it’s amping up the pressure. They actually say that building their subdivisions will allow people to drive through them to get to the wilderness.
This is DISGUSTING!
Thanks for bringing it to our attention. We have to put pressure on our elected officials NOT to let it happen. Once that wilderness is gone, it is gone FOREVER….. Unchecked development is a blight. Yes, development will happen but leave large pockets of green for future Haligonians to enjoy. Short term gain for long term loss does not make sense. Developers are only in it to line their pockets.
The “more information” link just takes me back to this post. Where can I get more information? When is the next meeting?
I’ll have more info as the meeting approaches. But here’s some things I’ve already written:
http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/blue-mounta…
http://www.thecoast.ca/halifax/suburban-ho…
It’s important not to demonize the Jodreys and the Armoyans and their employees. They are simply doing business, and if you’re in the land development business, well, you develop land.
Having said that, developers realize that one of the risks these days is city planning that builds in green space, sometimes lots of it. They may not like it much if that green space ends up on their land – they’d vastly prefer it if there *was* plenty of green space, on someone else’s land, nice and close to their own subdivisions – but they can roll with a few punches.
What worries me is a supine mayor and a supine city council, who really don’t even have to be pressured much to do whatever they think the developers would like. They are the problem, not the Jodreys and the Armoyans.
As a user of the Birch Cove/Blue Mountain area, I find this disgusting. That whole area truly is a gem. There is a huge potential for canoe and kayak use, backwoods camping, hiking, trail running, and orienteering. Too many people using this area for these things may start to ruin the beauty of it, but anything is better than having this beautiful parkland developed. I think the city should step up and continue what the province started and keep this for the people.