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Joe Gallivan (Director of Planning and Economic Development) and Megan Rueckwald (Manager of Community Planning) came to Council as a delegation from Frontenac County. They brought an update on population projections for South Frontenac and outlined some of the planning advantages of introducing privately owned communal water and sewage treatment services in South Frontenac.

“The timing couldn’t be better”, said Gallivan, referring to the Township’s current updating of the Official Plan, and the projection that 80% of the County’s population growth over the next few decades is projected to occur in Southern Frontenac. He described how communal services would make it possible to develop smaller lots, to create infill and more ‘walkable’ communities. One issue is the requirement that the municipality support communal systems by assuming some responsibility for the greater degree of financial risk.

Mayor Vandewal said the first five years would be critical: if the municipality could hold some of the responsibility for that period, it would allow time to build up a reserve and become self-supporting for maintenance issues, much as the Sydenham water treatment plant has done. 

Councillor Morey referred to last week’s delegations of residents upset about a subdivision setback being changed to permit a smaller front yard setback. “Might this tightening of space and greater density discourage people?”

“This will be the Township’s decision,” said Gallivan; “There are people coming from the city who don’t know anything about septic systems, and might prefer not to have to learn how to live with one.”

Vandewal added that there would probably be a market for people who couldn’t afford large lots and houses.

Claire Dodds (Township Director of Development Services), said “This would give us a viable alternative to the current lot size, which right now we do not have. We can set the limits, the parameters. It might be a good way to provide more units for seniors.

Councillor Ruttan agreed; “Smaller lots could provide a wider range of living choices for our residents.

Deputy Mayor Sutherland asked if there was any room for consideration of the effects of climate change; Rueckwald replied that the development consultation process could take these concerns into consideration. Mayor Vandewal summed the discussion up; “What’s most important is that our Township plans and controls how future growth takes place.”

Lake Ecosystem Advisory Committee

Following a request from Council, CAO Carbone brought a draft of terms of reference for a proposed Lake Ecosystem Advisory Committee for discussion. This committee could meet quarterly and would provide a new conduit through which council and senior staff could receive feedback from Lake Associations annually in advance of the budget process, and would also provide feedback to the township as it develops a lake study grant program.

Its priority would be to “promote and support growth that meets the community’s needs while maintaining the integrity of our natural environment.”

Deputy Mayor Sutherland asked why there was no provision for a secretary for the committee: Carbone said that staff would provide clerical support.

Mayor Vandewal said it was important to be clear that this is an advisory committee, to make recommendations to Council for consideration, but it would be subject to the Official Plan, the Planning Act, and other applicable township policies.

Strategic Plan Action Items

In discussing the final draft of Council’s Strategic Plan’s action items, Mayor Vandewal said that he had heard comments that positioning South Frontenac as a community leader was all the staff’s idea, so that it was important to emphasize that the Strat Plan is the result of staff-Council collaboration.

CAO Carbone agreed: “even when staff initiates an idea, they look to council for support and direction; we do not act unilaterally.”

Vandewal said that the staff/Council interrelationship was essential:

“If it was all left up to Council, probably nothing much would happen.”

Ad Bags Litter Roadsides

The problem of plastic-bagged Frontenac This Week advertising bundles littering roadsides led to a lively discussion: while some residents may look forward to these, many of the bags just pile up along streets and roadways.

Previous discussions between the Township and the distribution company have led to many promises but no resolution. (Other than the papers along the Mayor’s road have recently been stuffed into mailboxes.) Staff agreed to try to find a resolution: they will also check with other municipalities to see how they have dealt with the problem.

Lakeshore Clearcutting

Deputy Mayor Sutherland and Mayor Vandewal distributed photos of a swath of clearcutting on the Sydenham Lake shoreline just outside the village. In spite of clear evidence that all trees and undergrowth have been removed, and much of the brush has been burned on the ice, so far there seems to be nothing in the Township’s regulations that can prevent this. Only when a building or development permit is issued can a site plan with shoreline protection be instituted.

Published in SOUTH FRONTENAC
Wednesday, 13 December 2017 12:10

Sydenham Lake Stewardship Plan Completed

Gord Rodgers of French Planning Services and Bill Peairs, Chair of Sydenham Lake Association, presented Council with the final version of the Sydenham Lake Plan, which was developed over the past two years. An attractive readable 31 page document, its overall goal is to “identify and protect the significant social, natural and physical features that make the lake and its surrounding area a healthy natural environment and a desirable place for people to live and visit.”

Of the 52 recommended actions in the plan, Rodgers focussed on the 11 that were relevant to the Township. (At least one of these, the protection of the dark sky, is already under implementation, with the upgrading of Sydenham streetlights.)

The final recommendation was that a working group be established, with representatives from the Lake Association, the Township and the Cataraqui Regional Conservation Authority (CRCA). This group would meet annually to “guide the plan and its actions into the future.”

Rodgers thanked the Township and the CRCA for their support and encouragement, and said that money from the Ministry of the Environment’s Source Water Protection Fund had made the plan possible.

(The complete plan is currently available in draft form on the SLA website).

In answer to Councillor McDougall’s query about possible sources of funding for other Township Lake Associations to do similar Lake Plans, Rodgers said it was very difficult. However, he did suggest that a more modest plan could probably be achieved without the help of a consultant, if there were volunteers willing and able to do the necessary work.

Proposed Shooting Range in Portland District
Council was asked to consider approval of a private shooting range proposed by Scanlon Road resident Stephen Saunders.

Private shooting ranges fall under the jurisdiction of the Chief Firearms Officer of the Ontario Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, and are strictly controlled and monitored bi-annually. One of the conditions for establishing a range is a letter from the local municipality sating ; a) that the Municipality has no objection to the range, and b) the range would not contravene any municipal by-laws relating to the use of the range and discharging of firearms. Planner Lindsay Mills notes that there is nothing in the Township’s zoning by-law, or the provincial Planning Act that would prevent the use.

Council was unanimous in its agreement that it was important to notify neighbours of the proposal, so they would have the opportunity to speak to Council if they had concerns. CAO Orr said that there was no established process for this, and Council again agreed that he should follow the same timeline and notification protocol used for severance applications.

Recruitment Woes
South Frontenac Township is currently without a Manager of Development Services (MDS), or a Chief Building Official. The position of MDS was recently created, in response to increasing development pressures and the stated goal of seeking delegated authority to approve subdivisions and plans of condominium by 2018. The first round of recruitment was unsuccessful, and in the second round, Forbes Symon was hired. However, after six months, Mr Symon left this September for a similar position in Perth, where he lived. To date, no suitable replacement has been found.

Before re-advertising in the new year, Mayor Vandewal suggested Council might wish to discuss whether they even wanted to continue with the recently-created position.

The answer was clear. “It was a great advantage, having a Development Services Manager for six months. It would be a mistake to lose sight of that” (Sutherland); “That position offered comfort and confidence”, (McDougall); “The Development Services Manager brought strength and breadth of experience - it’s hard to have lost that,” (Schjerning). The rest of Council were equally supportive of continuing to recruit for the position.

The Building Department has had what Orr calls “a chronic problem” keeping anyone in the position of Chief Building Official since Councillor Alan Revill retired from the job in early 2012. Since then there have been three full-time hires and four Acting CBO’s appointed in between: most recently, Ryan Arcand left in November after eleven months as CBO to return to the City of Kingston. Staff are currently interviewing applicants. In spite of a seasonal drop in demand, the remaining building official is not able to keep up with the workload. Orr summarizes: “staff are also exploring other creative options on how to deliver service, however, it is premature to comment on their feasibility or possibility.”

Published in SOUTH FRONTENAC

Septic systems are as much of a defining characteristic of rural areas as pickup trucks, fishing rods, beaver dams, and rubber boots in the springtime.

Urban residents can remain blissfully unaware of what happens once everything is flushed down the toilet or the sink, but not so in the countryside. One way or another, our human waste must be dealt with on our own land, and that costs money and requires due diligence.

A proposal to establish a mandatory septic inspection regime has now been deferred in Central Frontenac, and a proposal to explore the issue has been pulled from debate in South Frontenac just this week.

The idea is supported and has been pushed mostly by lake associations on behalf of their members. They see mandatory assessments of septic systems as one of the key factors in keeping lakes healthy.

The opposition to these mandatory inspections comes from concerns about the potential cost of replacing septic systems, which is the worst case scenario. Property owners of limited means, most of whom live on back lots or older former farm properties, could be hit with punitive costs, $10,000 or more, if their systems fail an inspection, money they don’t necessarily have.

A mandatory inspection system has to treat everyone in the same way. You can’t exactly ask a homeowner what their annual income is before inspecting their system and whoever is doing the assessment needs to treat every system the same way.
Nobody wants to have a faulty septic system, but what the resistance to mandatory inspections has revealed is that, particularly in Central Frontenac, a lot of people are afraid their system is lacking and since they are already struggling to pay ever increasing taxes and electricity and fuel costs, they can’t afford an unexpected large bill.

Census information bears this out. The average income of permanent residents, particularly in Central and North Frontenac is way below the provincial average. With the exception of the growth area of South Frontenac, the so-called bedroom communities within a short distance of the City, there is a high percentage of the population in Frontenac County who struggle to keep their bills paid and maintain their only real asset, their homes, in a reasonable state of repair.

The irony is, and this is what advocates of the mandatory system point out, that by taking inexpensive measures before a system fails, homeowners can save their systems before they need to be replaced.

In Central Frontenac, the matter was sent back to committee, partly so the community can come up with a plan to deal with the fallout for people who receive orders to replace their system but don’t have access to the necessary funds.

We have seen more letters about this in recent weeks than we normally see about a local political issue, for a number of reasons. Those who support the inspection have, for the most part, been working on this issue for years. They see the current voluntary inspection system that targets different lakes each year, as a doomed system. Property owners who are unwilling or unable to keep their systems up or replace them are the ones who refuse the inspections.

There are those who oppose mandatory inspections on political grounds, seeing it as a government imposition on private land, and there are others who oppose it because they think it will push vulnerable people out of their homes.

This leaves politicians in between of two opposing forces. Do they do the right thing to protect the land and the water, or do they do right by ratepayers who are already struggling to pay their tax bills in the first place. To find a middle path can be complicated. How much money does the township, which is already struggling financially, need to put aside to protect the vulnerable from these potential costs in order to satisfy the legitimate concerns of lake associations and others that septic systems aren’t leaching phosphates into the lakes and watersheds. How will the system be managed? What role will the septic pumpers play in policing the system?

The devil really is in the details if local townships want to deal with this issue, and they might be wise to wait until the province weighs in on the matter, which might happen later this year.

The reality that this whole debate has brought to the surface is one that is usually kept under wraps, the often extreme income gap between the haves and have-nots in Frontenac County.

We do a better job, maybe because our communities are small and we all rub shoulders at local stores or waste sites or public gatherings, of inter-mingling between the poor and the wealthy, than they do in cities where people remain cloistered in their own neighbourhoods.

From time to time, however,  the tensions do come to the surface and in order to deal with them we all need to listen carefully, respectfully, to each other.

Published in Editorials
Wednesday, 11 February 2015 23:12

Gray Merriam: Landscape ecologist

Unlike a number of people being profiled for the Frontenac County 50 stories/150 years project, Gray Merriam does not have deep family roots in Frontenac County.

He first came to Kennebec Lake, with his wife Aileen, because they were starting to look for a place to move to after Gray had retired from Carleton University, and they happened to be headed to Toronto for a conference.

“There was a property on Kennebec Lake, and it was on the way so we stopped in,” he recalls.

It was early March and they could not take the road all the way in to the property for fear of not getting back out, so they left their car behind and walked in.

“I wanted to live within two canoe lengths of the water, which this property had since the house is right on the Salmon River, where it flows from Kennebec Lake. To tell the truth even before we got to the house I was sold on the property because of the snow fleas that made it look like the snow was moving in waves.”

Gray began his academic career as a population ecologist and was one of the people who developed landscape ecology as an academic pursuit.

“I began my career as a population ecologist and developed landscape ecology, with others, during my time at Carleton,” he said.

Landscape ecology was different at that time because it was based in Europe and was urban-based. It was connected to urban planning.

“When we started looking at it here it was more about large mosaics of various habitat types. It was farmland so you had little sugar bushes at the back of the farm, farm fence rows, crop field, hay fields, little creeks with some brush along them, and that entire mosaic was what the organisms were living with so we tried to study that entire mosaic. Previously ecologists tried to narrow things down to one little homogeneous bit, but it was clear to us that everything around it was the driving variable for how it all worked.”

This approach was used at first to determine, for example, how populations of bird species could survive in farmlands where there are only small pockets of suitable habitat.

“It turned out, that while small populations were vulnerable because they did not always breed, other populations would migrate to the habitat if it was not being used. So this tells you that the fate of a population in a single woodlot goes on and off like a little neon light but the fate of population in the region has a very high level of security. What that led to is a realisation that the organisms located between different patches of habitat are very important for the species to be able to migrate from one patch to another. It's the nature of the movements between patches of habitat that determine the success rate. So we did a lot of work on farm fence rows as a connectivity."

This kind of academic pursuit brought Merriam into contact with ecologists and other academics from across North America and elsewhere. When he retired he took on the goal of seeing if the principles of landscape ecology could be applied in his new community.

“The first thing was to bring the idea of ecological processes in lakes to try to engage the folks on the lakes about water quality sampling, shoreline surveys, and that led eventually to the lake planning that has become popular everywhere. Lake plans are based on the ideas of landscape ecology, especially when they extend to looking at watersheds as a whole,” he said.

One thing that Merriam did was to start writing articles for the Frontenac News, and writing books. He also founded the Friends of the Salmon River, and became instrumental in the work of the Frontenac Stewardship Council, which is now the Frontenac Stewardship Foundation. When Frontenac County began to set out an Official Plan, he began pushing for a Stewardship Plan for Frontenac County, a goal that he is still pursuing.

“The Friends of the Salmon came about when I met some neighbours downriver and we started talking about the health of the river and how we could monitor it. So I held a meeting at my house and a number of people came and they became the Friends of the Salmon.”

He expected he would find hot spots and complaints about the state of the river. “There weren't any, which makes it more difficult to organize people but there you have it.”

If there is a single issue that is most important about the future of the lakes along the Salmon River watersheds and all the watersheds in Frontenac County, he says it is phosphorous. Most of the phosphorous affecting lakes here is coming from faulty septic systems.

“We understand the role of septics, but the problem is the people, who resist being told what to do, and the potential cost is an issue as well. But by focussing on waterfront properties the people who own them tend to have more money available. The properties on the hillsides don't have the same problem because the runoff from the septics is taken up by vegetation, trees, etc.” he said.

On all the groups he has been involved with he sometimes comes into conflict over what he calls his “insistence that projects that get done make ecological sense.”

Another thing that he has pushed over the years is the interest of the north end of the county over what he sees as a bias towards the south.

“When I first was introduced to the Stewardship Council it was known as the South Frontenac Stewardship Council and it did not consider that it would ever extend north of Highway 7. We had to convince them there was life up here,” he said.

One of the things that he has been able to focus people's attention on is the two different geological regions in Frontenac County, the Limestone substrate in the South and the Canadian Shield landscape to the north.

These issues will be discussed in the extended version of this article, which will be published on February 26, in the 50 articles / 150 years supplement that will be a monthly feature of the Frontenac News for the rest of the year.

Published in 150 Years Anniversary
With the participation of the Government of Canada