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For a little river, the Carp is generating a bucketful of political trouble for the City of Ottawa.
The Kanata West development, a huge building plan and one of the most debated projects in Ottawa’s recent history, is again ankle-deep in controversy.
Four parties have filed objections to the development this summer, with formal arguments put before Ontario Environment Minister Laurel Broten. The environmentalists stalling the development of 725 hectares around Scotiabank Place say an important portion of the land is in the flood plain of the Carp River, and should not be built upon.
The city, however, says part of the floodplain, 28 hectares, can be built on because it isn’t true floodway but rather “flood fringe.” The city agrees with the property owners that this land can be built on safely, if proper flood-control measures are taken and building is done strictly on the fringe of the waterway, rather than the floodway proper. And if the development does proceed, a multimillion-dollar restoration of the Carp River is to go ahead.
The city’s plan for Kanata West is that it would be a community with a mix of businesses, housing and stores. The area has been a proposed development site since the 1980s, when Ottawa Senators founder Bruce Firestone first proposed that an NHL arena be surrounded by a new community called West Terrace.
The Ontario government allowed the arena but didn’t allow development of the land around it at that time. In recent years, the City of Ottawa has decided that developing the land around the arena would be good for Kanata. Recently, the city has surprised environmentalists by even supporting the development in what traditionally would be classified as floodplain. The city even allowed some building in the area before getting the all-clear from the provincial government.
The city is supported in its position by the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority, which has agreed that the two-zone approach to floodplain lands—floodway and flood fringe—can be applied.
The environmentalists opposed to the project are upset that a conservation authority—one of the agencies created in the wake of Hurricane Hazel in the 1950s to guard against flooding in Ontario—would make this concession.
What makes the issue sticky for the city, however, is that one of its own staff members, water resources engineer Ted Cooper, is opposing the city’s position on Kanata West and is one of the four parties asking the provincial government to stop the project, or at least delay it while further study is done.
Contacted by the Citizen, Mr. Cooper said he can’t comment on the situation.
But Mr. Cooper’s views are spelled out in his request to Ms. Broten for another round of environmental study of the issue. The ministry released the document to the Citizen.
Mr. Cooper notes in his submission that the proposed developments are just downstream from Glen Cairn in Kanata, where the City of Ottawa has just finished spending $7 million to remediate flooding episodes in 1996 and 2002, during which dozens of homes were flooded after a blocked, too-small culvert couldn’t handle the rush of water.
Mr. Cooper also argues that the reports supporting development in the floodplain lack monitoring data to properly run the water models that justify building on the land.
He says the Carp has experienced “100-year” rainfall events in 1996, 2002 and 2004.
More generally, Mr. Cooper points out that a report in 2005 for the city’s planning and environment committee concluded there are 39 neighbourhoods where flooding problems exist and that $45 million must be spent over the next few years to fix the problems.
Added to the list this summer, says Mr. Cooper, was flooding on July 3 at Belcourt Boulevard and St. Joseph Boulevard in Orleans, where water surfaced from a storm sewer.
Mr. Cooper notes that flooding is a threat to public health and “the City of Ottawa has a long history of flooding problems.”
Mr. Cooper’s boss at the city, planning director Dennis Jacobs, says there have been many planners and engineers involved in the planning for Kanata West. He says Mr. Cooper disagreed with the majority and has been assigned to other engineering duties since the fall of 2004. Mr. Jacobs says Mr. Cooper’s opinions expressed about the issue are “as a private citizen.”
Mr. Cooper’s concerns are shared by some prominent people.
Ottawa Riverkeeper Meredith Brown, who is also making a formal objection to Kanata West, says it’s wrong to have a city government allowing, even encouraging, development on a flood plain and that it creates a terrible precedent for future developments along waterways.
“This is just a bad idea,” she says. “The smartest thing to do is stay off the flood plain.”
Ms. Brown, in her objection filed with the provincial government, says that if some of the Kanata West floodplain is filled in and built on, the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority won’t be able to refuse future petitioning by nearby landowners to also fill in parts of the flood plain currently outside the urban border.
Former Kanata councillor Alex Munter, who is running for mayor, says “it’s just asking for trouble” to allow building in the flood plain of the Carp. He says the fact that a city staff member didn’t want to sign off on the development should raise “a lot of alarm bells.”
The Ontario Environmental Commissioner’s office said this week it is reviewing the issue of allowing building on flood plain that is called flood fringe.
The Carp is more of a big stream than a river. In parts, it is little more than a man-made drainage ditch, or a creek choked by sediment. In others, it is a little river shaped by natural flows, meandering through the northwest area of Ottawa and emptying into the Ottawa River at Fitzroy Harbour, via Kanata, Carp and Kinburn.
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It is fed by four creeks: Corkery, Huntley, Feedmill and Poole. It drains an area of about 300 square kilometres, is 42 kilometres long and carries a variety of fish species.
The Carp’s flow picks up, and sometimes floods, in the spring. A City of Ottawa watershed study found that 59 per cent of the waterway’s flow is in March and April.
That same study noted that there’s been a slight decline in water flow over the last three decades, perhaps due to the reduced snowpack melting in the developed lands along the river.
Environmentalists questioning the Kanata West development say that whether it’s a little water or a lot of water, any low-lying land at risk of flooding is a bad place to build. Even if the waterway is nearly dry by fall, if it’s overflowing in springtime, it’s trouble.
It’s not that Ottawa has been completely free of building on floodplains. The development of Britannia Village, Constance Bay and older neighbourhoods near the Rideau River have all been in floodplain and have had flooding problems. But the provincial government has a policy of not building in floodplain.
For people in the Carp River Coalition, one of the groups objecting to Kanata West, it’s not just the risk of basements filling up with water but, rather, the wider effects of lots of building near the waterway, which empties into the Ottawa, the city’s water source.
Trees and vegetation next to, and in a waterway—and to a lesser extent farm fields—help the land soak up water. Concrete and asphalt just funnel water away more quickly and don’t filter out contaminants. Get rid of the floodplain, and you lose a giant sponge around the river, one that comes in handy during unusual storms, such as the unusual 2004 storm that dumped up to 180 millimetres of rain on Ottawa in 24 hours.
The city, and the roughly 40 property owners in Kanata West, say they are going to great lengths to study all implications of this development, and ensure that buildings in the new community aren’t flooded.
Jack Stirling, vice-president of Minto Developments—one of the developers owning land in Kanata West—says the Carp is a small waterway, little more than a ditch in some places. He says it’s more like “a vibrant creek” than a river, and he says, if there has been flooding in the past in Glen Cairn, it’s because that community was built according to 1960s stormwater standards.
He says every care will be taken to ensure that flooding is not a problem.
“We’re not stupid. We’re not going to be building houses for people to be flooded,” says Mr. Stirling.
Kanata Councillor Peggy Feltmate says the issue has been chewed over many times at City Hall and she’s spent much time asking questions of the engineers, then listening carefully to their answers in an attempt to get to the bottom of the issue. She is supporting the proposed development, though she doesn’t sound totally convinced, saying, “You just hope that we’ve made the right decision.”
It seems almost certain that the building in Kanata West will go ahead. With strong support from the city and the conservation authority, it would be a shocking reversal if it didn’t.
But two things could mitigate the environmental effects of the development.
One is the question of what is built in the flood fringe. If parks and stormwater ponds are placed in the fringe, rather than houses, the risk of flooding would be less of an issue. A flooded park isn’t nearly as big a problem as a flooded subdivision packed with houses. The decision of what goes where will be made when the plan of subdivision—the detailed building plan—is brought for approval to the city.
The other element is the restoration of the Carp River.
David Spence, founder of the Friends of the Carp River, says that if there is to be building along the Carp, there must be an accompanying restoration project to improve the health of the river, and not a small one.
The Friends have been working for 14 years to improve the waterway and made some progress, with projects such as 50,000 tree plant-ings so far.
Mr. Spence shows the challenge by standing on a bridge over the Carp on Thomas Dolan Parkway, near the community of Carp.
On one side of the bridge, the river is not in great shape: It’s completely unshielded from the sun. A blue-green algae is growing and there are footprints on the shore that appear to be the work of cows grazing on pasture beside the river.
On the other side of the bridge, the river is in much better shape.
Trees, including a black willow, lean over the water and there’s lots of other vegetation along the shoreline that helps stop soil erosion into the river and shades the water. Cooler water retains more oxygen and is better fish habitat. There is no algae in the cooler water.
What Mr. Spence and his colleagues in the Friends want to do is to nurse the health of the river along with a series of projects, done in co-operation with landowners.
These include tree plantings, building fences to keep livestock near the shore away from the water, pumping water up from the river to cattle, and restoring wetlands so that plant materials help cleanse runoff water. The group works co-operatively with landowners.
In years past, improvements to the Carp have included building straight, deeper channels to improve the flow of water. But the current thinking is that the waterway needs the twists and turns, called meanderings, to flow naturally, so more of them could be created. There could be some dredging of sediment along the river to improve the flow, but there could also be some narrowing in certain spots.
Just how big the river restoration project should be is the key sticking point.
City and conservation authority officials say it will be from Hazeldean Road to Richardson Sideroad—a project that would cost about $4 million—because that’s the urban area and that’s where the development will be.
The Friends of the Carp want the project to run all the way to Carp, a project that would cost about $10 million.
The rationale for that is simple. If the city wants to build great new expanses of asphalt and concrete in parking lots, rooftops, driveways and garages—sending all of the road salt, vehicle fluids, pet waste and stormwater into the Carp—the river downstream is at higher risk of flooding and deteriorating water quality. The city needs to help out the river, says Mr. Spence.
He argues that to only do the work to Richardson Sideroad is like calling in a plumber and only having him clear the pipe immediately from the sink.
Mr. Spence points out that improving the water quality of the Carp is just smart thinking for the city. After all, the Carp empties into the Ottawa, upriver of the city’s filtration plants at Britannia and Lemieux Island, where the people of Ottawa get their drinking water.