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Friends of the Cawthra Bush & Greater Mississauga Area
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Page - - Mississauga News, Jan. 24/99 - By JOHN STEWART Staff Years of hard work pay off City's Purchase of wetland satisfying victory for activists Jocelyn Webber was in her laboratory at Erindale College one day in August 1987 when two students working for the local conservation authority asked her for help. They wanted assistance in identifying some bog plant species they'd found in a site they were examining for Credit Valley Conservation. "Where did you get these?" a bewildered Webber asked, knowing that the items could only be from one of a relatively few bog sites in southern Ontario. When the answer came that they were from a nearby Mississauga property, Webber was intrigued. She went out to the northeast corner of Eglinton Ave. and Creditview Rd. and was amazed at what she found. What started that day for the PhD botany student was a decade long quest to have the value of the Creditview bog recognized and have it brought into public hands. Although that looked like a bleak possibility on many occasions such as the night City council appeared certain to vote to allow the subdivision to go ahead until Mayor Hazel McCallion said a "lame duck" council shouldn't make such a decision Webber and a core group of dedicated individuals pressed ahead. Just a few weeks after City council approved a motion to buy the bog for $3 million, considerably less than "up to $30 million" that was quoted as its value originally, Webber can still hardly believe that the fight is really over. "It's just such a relief," the Sheridan Homelands resident said in an interview. "I have to pinch myself to make sure it's true." When Webber thinks back to those early days of the battle, she shudders at how easily the unique area might have been lost. "No one knew it was there," she says. "It was so scary." Yet anyone who visited the site and had any botanical background could see its inherent value. "Anyone who saw this thing knew," she says. "You just don't see areas like that with the hummocks and peat and ferns." Although the developers tried to pass the wetland off as an area created by the installation of a culvert some 10 years earlier and a breeding ground for mosquitoes likely to carry encephalitis, Webber and the Creditview Wetlands Preservation Group went to work. They enlisted Dr. Paul Maycock of Erindale, with whom Webber was studying, to give his expert opinion that the bog was absolutely unique to this area. Then the citizens ventured into unknown territory the political process. That involved making delegations to city council, asking for a consultant's study to show the wetland's worth, collecting the names of 10,000 people on a petition to save the area and eventually meeting with top-level Ministry of Environment officials to try to broker a three-way acquisition deal. When that deal never materialized, the City redesigned the subdivisions surrounding the bog (to allow drainage to the wetland to help preserve it) and designated it as a provincially significant wetland in the new City Plan. Then the developers, frustrated at years of promises of public acquisition which were never followed up, appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) in a hearing that was to start next month. That's when the fear of losing the wetland reared its head again, and again Webber went into the area to begin finding new plant species and birds to raise the precious wetland "score" which determines its value on a provincial ranking scale. She and her husband, Jeff Kaiser, a biologist, did such a good job of recording the area's virtues, that it ended up with a higher technical score than Rattray Marsh. That helped bolster the City's potential defence of its case at the OMB and may have helped cement the deal recently, where Mississauga agreed to pay $3 million, $800,000 now and the remainder by the end of March, to buy the wetland. Ward 6 Councillor David Culham, who pressed strongly for the acquisition after becoming councillor for the area in 1992, says it would never have happened without the tremendous number of hours of voluntary field work contributed by Webber and others. While the sensitive wetland may never have boardwalks throughout, as Rattray does, Culham hopes it will become a "living laboratory" for students, Scouts, girl guides and any other interested citizens. He foresees a raised lookout area where the bog could be observed. He's already asked teachers to begin developing curriculum around the site. "There's a great opportunity here," says Culham. "This tells us who we are as a city. We need to find a balance with the natural areas." The City has $1.1 million already raised or contributed from developers' levies to pay for the bog. The remainder of the money will come from reserves dedicated to parkland acquisition. The councillor says the developers are also to be lauded for their patience in the protracted process that has finally led to acquisition of their lands. At one time they went to the courts on the basis that their land, originally approved for housing, had been, in effect, expropriated without compensation. Lawyer Gerry Swinkin, who represents the bog's owners, says the OMB appeal seemed "to focus people's minds that it was time to deal with this. "I think everybody is happy," Swinkin said, "although the owners came away with less than they were looking for. I think the City is happy to secure this and give some certainty to it. In the end, they both wanted the same thing." PHOTO; Jocelyn Webber standing in the bog, in winter. CAPTION; Jocelyn Webber celebrates in the thick snow that covers the Creditview Bog, the environmentally significant wetland that she helped to save from development bulldozers after an 11 year fight. BY; Staff photo by Fred Loek PLEEASSE SIGN OUR PETITION It will make a difference! Home page - Main Table of Contents - Back to Top [COMMENTS BY DON B. - ] |
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