[All] Provincial push to loosen rules on aggragate extraction-Regional Council vote tomorrow

[Gregory C. Michalenko]

Thanks for sending this Lori.  I've been in touch with the Region planners and seen the report they have crafted.  The proposed changes to provincial planning legislation have three particularly horrible "reforms": prohibition of municipalities imposing stricter regulations on gravel extraction than the Province, such as the Region of Waterloo's regulation that a 1.5 meter protective buffer has to be left; allowing developments like gravel extraction to occur in designated natural heritage sites on the flimsy grounds of a claim that eventual rehabilitation can restore it (e.g., a significant forest could be cut down and grubbed out); and a requirement that municipal assessment of housing development proposals should take into account "market value" (much more profit can be made on single detached house construction than on social housing: this could give such proposals the edge in appeals to the resurrected OMB).  And there is much more.  The Ford bunch are as bad as ever despite the cheery chirping after the federal election about how they want to be good buddies and cooperate with other jurisdictions.


You can see the report that will be delivered at the council meeting by going to the Region website and clicking on the agenda for the council meeting, which includes the document package that councillors receive a few days prior to meetings.  You can submit a comment to the Environmental Registry, but the deadline is very close - November 4th.  I'm composing a comment on behalf of GREN today and will circulate it to the GREN list tomorrow..

- Greg Michalenko


________________________________
From: All <all-bounces at gren.ca> on behalf of strothjkl at sympatico.ca <strothjkl at sympatico.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2019 10:42 AM
To: GREN
Subject: [All] Provincial push to loosen rules on aggragate extraction-Regional Council vote tomorrow

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/province-s-plans-to-change-gravel-pit-rules-could-harm-local-water-natural-areas-report-1.5338478   This is to be voted on at Regional Council tomorrow.
[https://i.cbc.ca/1.5338661.1572295963!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/aerial-photo.jpg]<https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/province-s-plans-to-change-gravel-pit-rules-could-harm-local-water-natural-areas-report-1.5338478>

www.cbc.ca
Regional staff are urging the province to reconsider changes that would loosen rules around gravel mining and other aggregate extraction.




This morning on CBC-KW they interviewed a Land Use Planning staffperson from the Region of Waterloo, I imagine the same one quoted in the article above,  and he said they have written up their views against it -and their position paper on this will be voted on at Regional Council tomorrow -Wed. Oct. 30th…and then they will send it to the Ford people. One of the primary concerns here is that if construction is allowed to go too deep, below the water table, it could contaminate our aquifers, so at a bare minimum, they want it to be stipulated that anything approved has to be above the waterline.  But it sounds like they are completely against the concept in general.  This involves many other types of projects- not just aggragate.

Lori S.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://gren.ca/pipermail/all_gren.ca/attachments/20191029/057696c8/attachment.html>