Hamilton council calls for tree-protection review after Twenty Road cut

Mayor Andrea Horwath ‘really unhappy’ about removal from parcel recently folded into urban area

Thestar.com
April 13, 2024
Teviah Moro

The city will examine its tree-protection bylaws after a developer felled dozens without a permit on land the province recently folded into Hamilton’s urban area.

After discovering the Twenty Road West parcel’s razed trees in mid-March, the city issued a stop-work order and launched an investigation.

“We need to get this policy right,” Glanbrook councillor Mark Tadeson, who called for the staff review of tree-protection mechanisms for the province’s expansion lands and parcels it has removed from the Greenbelt, said Wednesday.

The issue isn’t farmers managing woodlots, or homeowners removing a tree to build a deck, he said.

“This is about clear-cutting woodlots or trees with heritage value for the purposes of profit-oriented development to build houses on land where development doesn’t need to occur in our now-expanded urban boundary.”

The “stark images” of the downed trees were “pretty upsetting,” said Mayor Andrea Horwath, who backed Tadeson’s call for a review along with council.

“As mayor, I’m really unhappy about how this all shook down, and you know, there does have to be some kind of trust built.”

Some developers “do things the right way ... and they rue the fact that developers have a bad name,” Horwath said. “Well, this is why developers get a bad name, because of these exact kinds of behaviours.”

Starward Homes, meanwhile, argues it didn’t break the city’s urban woodland bylaw and has pointed to a consultant’s review that found the treed area in question didn’t “meet the minimum tree-density threshold” as stipulated.

In a letter to the city last week, president Brandon Campbell also asserted “woodlot management is typically accepted as part of normal agricultural activities,” even if the land is now within Hamilton’s urban boundary and slated for development.

In response, the city told The Spectator that staff were reviewing Starward’s letter “in order to determine next steps” and noted the ongoing probe into the tree removal could take as long as five weeks.

A Starward representative didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Hamilton has a variety of tree-protection bylaws, some of which pertain to the now amalgamated former municipalities, noted Jason Thorne, general manager of planning and economic development.

The more recent urban woodlot bylaw applies to areas that are more than half an acre and have a certain density of trees, Thorne pointed out.

But the question council has raised is whether that bylaw is the “best approach going forward, or should we be looking at what those thresholds are?”

Applicants that follow through planning process, however, can be exempt from the bylaw because staff deal with tree protection as a condition of approvals, Thorne noted.

Meanwhile, staff expect to present a report on an overarching urban forest strategy at the end of May that will feature a “consistent, citywide approach” to tree protection.

Increasingly, “progressive developers” see the value of incorporating wooded areas into their projects -- “that money really does grow on trees,” Coun. Ted McMeekin said.

“We should be encouraging developers to embrace that reality, and if they can’t embrace it, we should be discouraging them from doing what they’re doing.”

Under the urban wood conservation bylaw, depending on how many trees are affected, corporate fines can be upwards of $50,000 for initial offences. A “special fine” that could exceed $100,000 serves to “eliminate or reduce any economic advantage or gain” sought through transgressions.

The province’s decision in November to impose an urban expansion on Hamilton of about 2,000 hectares into rural areas looms large in the Twenty Road West tree-cutting incident. As well, the Progressive Conservative government has also pulled 769 local hectares from the Greenbelt.

Starward Homes is part of the Upper West Side Landowners Group, which hopes to build thousands of homes on the Twenty Road West land between Upper James Street, Glancaster Road and Dickenson Road near the airport employment area.

The Upper West Side developers and another group aiming to build along White Church Road east of Mount Hope were the first two to request formal consultations with city staff on pitches for the newly expanded urban areas.

The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing’s decision to expand Hamilton’s urban area came over the objection of anti-sprawl advocates and city council, which had proposed a freeze of the urban boundary.

In rejecting the city’s proposed growth blueprint, the province argued the expansion into new greenfield areas was needed to accommodate an expected growth to 820,000 residents by 2051 and help reach Ontario’s goal of 1.5 million new homes in the next decades, including 47,000 in Hamilton.

But to meet the city’s targets, the Twenty Road West parcel doesn’t need residential development “any time soon,” Coun. John-Paul Danko contended, echoing Tadeson’s remarks.

“Yet this is the fallout from the provincial government’s destructive decisions.”