Environmental group decries Lake Simcoe mobile-home park project

A 30-year-old plan to build a trailer park on wetland may live on despite new rules curbing development in the area.

Thestar.com
May 10, 2015
By Marco Chown Oved

A Georgina environmental group is crying foul after the local conservation authority delayed tougher wetlands protections, opening the door for the construction of a trailer park on an ecologically sensitive marsh.

The North Gwillimbury Forest Alliance says the Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority (LSRCA) is ignoring its mission to protect the environment and has instead facilitated a developer’s plan to salvage a 25-year-old development plan called the Maple Lakes Estate.

New watershed development policies that prohibit all development on provincially significant wetlands were adopted by the conservation authority last week, but they won’t be implemented until June.

“The LSRCA’s decision to delay the implementation of the new guidelines until June 1 will give the developers a five-week window to apply for a (construction) permit under the old rules,” said the group’s president, Jack Gibbons.

The DG Group (formerly Metrus Developments) did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Its website, however, speaks directly to the company’s environmental philosophy.

“We believe that, sometimes, the best thing a community builder can do is to build hardly anything at all,” the developer writes. “We also take great care in leaving natural valleys, wetlands and other ecological marvels just as they are, the way nature intended.”

DG Group bought the land on the shores of Lake Simcoe in the 1980s after it had already received planning approval for a 1,073-unit mobile-home park. The plan sat dormant for decades as the land around and under it was progressively protected. The area was designated a provincially significant wetland in 2004 and incorporated into the Greenbelt in 2005, but a clause that grandfathers in existing development approvals allowed the trailer park plan to live on.

In February last year, DG Group signed a legal undertaking to refrain from applying to develop the wetlands until new guidelines were in place.

But this month, ahead of the adoption of the new rules, the company applied to develop the land anyway.

“Instead of standing by its promise, the company appears to be trying to slide an application through under the old, outdated rules,” Gibbons said.

Avia Eek, a municipal councillor in King Township and member of the LSRCA, says the conservation authority delayed the adoption of the rules to be fair to other landowners affected. She explained that DG Group’s development proposal would not go ahead on the wetlands, and the conservation authority was instead recommending a plan to swap the wetlands for another, smaller piece of land immediately adjacent.

“What happened (Friday) is an incredibly good thing,” said Eek. “The Greenbelt could grow by 2 to 1. The forest will be saved. The developer is onside with that, and they’re going to take on a much smaller (175 acre) parcel. To me, it’s a win-win situation.”

“From a conservation authority point of view, we are preserving a very significant wetland - almost 500 acres,” she said.

The proposed swap would need approvals from the town, region and province to proceed.

But Gibbons and his group aren’t convinced. Both pieces of land involved in the swap are part of the Greenbelt and shouldn’t be developed at all, he said. He wants to see the conservation authority let the trailer park development lapse under the new rules instead of helping the developer trade for anther piece of protected land to build on.