Scarborough Waterfront Park from Bluffers to East Point coming to vote
Surfers, sandy beach advocates oppose $170-million proposal

InsideToronto.com
July 25, 2017
Mike Adler

Toronto and Region Conservation Authority board members face a long meeting Friday, July 28, deciding whether to endorse plans for a $170-million waterfront park system below the Scarborough Bluffs.

Surfers and self-appointed defenders of the “wild bluffs” and the shoreline’s sandy beaches oppose the Scarborough Waterfront Project, and several will speak against it.

One, author Jane Fairburn, calls the proposed trail links between East Point Park and Bluffers Beach “a concrete highway to nowhere that obliterates the beach destroys habits for threatened species.”

People who surf off Bluffers say the park proposal will remove favourable wave conditions.

Though the TRCA changed the plan to preserve a sandy beach at East Point, beach defenders say another below Gray Abbey Park will be lost to shoreline hardening.

Despite “vehement resistance” to its latest version, “the TRCA is marching ahead with its preordained plan and attempting to ram this malevolent, $170 million, 12-year disruptive boondoggle down the throats of taxpayers,” Fairburn wrote to the board this month.

The TRCA says a formal park system (see waterfront@trca.on.ca) is needed to give the public access to the shore, and part of the cost, which includes a 50 per cent contingency fund, will be buying property.

Most shoreline between East Point and Bluffers is already “hardened,” rebuilt with stone to reduce bluff erosion. Many residents already use a shoreline construction road east of the Bellamy Ravine.

The conservation authority, however, maintains the road and existing paths down to the shore aren’t safe, and people using the remaining sandy beaches are crossing private land and trampling “sensitive vegetation communities.”

At least one resident group, the Centennial Community and Recreation Association, supports the project, and the Waterfront Regeneration Trust, working toward a continuous Great Lakes Waterfront Trail for 25 years, says it “will be a much desired and used public space.”

The nonprofit agency is urging the TRCA and City of Toronto to approve and build it, saying that, “closing the gap in Scarborough with an initiative that reflects the vision and collective mandate for a regenerated, publicly accessible, connected waterfront has been long awaited.”

Board members will vote at TRCA’s headquarters in Vaughan.