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A city councillor says she’s frustrated after a recent incident at the former Kanata Golf and Country Club left the city feeling “caught off guard.”
Coun. Cathy Curry says she received an email from developer Minto Homes Thursday evening, letting her know there’d be work underway on the site the following day.
Until recently, the golf course was the centre of a long-running legal dispute between the city and ClubLink, over the property owner’s plan for a massive housing development on the site.
Clublink ultimately prevailed.
Curry says it was only Friday morning when she saw the email from Minto sitting in her inbox.
“With only moments to spare, I drove over to the golf course as fast as I could to see what was going on,” she told CBC News on Saturday.
“And I arrived just in time to see a fairly major bulldozer — [a] land-moving machine — making its way down the fairways.”
While ClubLink came out on top in the legal battles, Mayor Mark Sutcliffe has stated the city will not grant any of the easements — a legal right that lets one party use another’s land for a particular purpose — that the housing development might need.
Stormwater concerns, Curry said, are top of mind for many nearby residents, who believed the section of land would continue to be open space in perpetuity, part of the language of the original contract.
She said ClubLink told her in follow-up emails that a company had been contracted by Minto to clear snow and create a drivable path, making way for eventual soil testing.
Staff also confirmed the work as described is permitted as long as no trees are removed, the easements are left alone and there’s no large-scale earth work, Curry added.
Still, she said the short notice from the developer was upsetting.
“None of us at that point would know what was going on,” Curry said. “That is not the way we work with developers. So it was very disappointing to just get a few hours’ notice.”
Neither Minto Homes nor ClubLink responded to a request for comment on Saturday.
Barbara Ramsay, chair of the Kanata Greenspace Protection Coalition, calls the whole debacle “a stick in the eye.”
“They are angry because they realize the city continues to oppose their initiative,” Ramsay said. “And the proof is in the pudding.”
Barbara Ramsay, chair of the Kanata Greenspace Protection Coalition, calls the lack of ample notice from the developer “a stick in the eye” to both the councillor and her own organization.
(Hillary Johnstone/CBC News)
Many people who live nearby are concerned that mercury contamination on the site will become a larger problem if the land is disturbed, Ramsay said.
She said her organization believes Friday’s incident goes beyond communication issues.
“How do you think the community here feels sitting with bulldozers now starting to move — we’re told it is only snow — so they can get their trucks across the property to do testing, to do core testing?” Ramsay said.
“But in fact we don’t know if if they are disturbing the settled mercury. Who is overseeing this?”
On Wednesday, Curry will bring forward a motion at council, reminding city staff that 192 conditions for the development, laid out by the Ontario Land Tribunal, must be enforced.