Garner Marsh fate postponed
The Ontario Land Tribunal (OLT) hearing respecting the Garner Road Marsh property scheduled to start on October 2 has apparently been postponed. It was to determine the fate of the wetland and farmland at 140 Garner Road East in Ancaster in a scheduled 15-day hearing.
The delay is revealed in a motion approved by the Hamilton Conservation Authority (HCA) board at its September meeting and now made public in the draft minutes. It was discussed in camera but the text of the motion has been made public by the Board.
The HCA motion approves “the request for an adjournment”, but hints that the developer may be the reason for the delay. The motion specifically asks that OLT ensure that strict rules are “imposed for the delivery of ONE Properties Inc materials to ensure a future hearing date can be determined.”
ONE Properties wants to build five warehouses on 35 hectares that lie adjacent to the Highway 6 bypass. It sought a permit from the HCA in June 2021 to remove a marsh from the property in return for promising to construct a pond beside the highway.
The property owner is AIMCo, the Alberta corporation that manages multiple public sector pension funds. It previously purchased majority interest in the controversial Coastal Gas Link fracked gas pipeline being pushed through northern BC partly on the unceded lands of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation.
The HCA board refused the permit, and ONE Properties appealed the decision to the OLT. It subsequently also filed an appeal against the city about a five-year old development application made for the same property by an earlier owner. ONE Properties justified the second appeal by arguing that the city had failed to make a decision on what appears to have been an abandoned application.
The OLT decided to combine the two appeals a year ago and set the hearing date. The city is supporting the HCA permit refusal, as is Environmental Defence who have obtained party status to protect the marsh at the request of Save Our Streams Hamilton.
The postponement would likely have required the agreement of the four parties – HCA, the city, Environmental Defence and One Properties Inc. The 24 citizen participants would have been excluded and at this point have not been informed of the postponement. At this point, there is no information about it on the OLT website.
Inclusion of the HCA decision in public minutes, an unusual step, is specifically called for in the motion. The mover and seconder are both new citizen members of the HCA board – Brian McHattie and Wayne Terryberry.
