By Pepper Parr

August 5th, 2106

BURLINGTON, ON

The Air Park has taken on a legal life of its own that just may see Court cases that make their way to the Supreme Court of Canada – the issue is that significant to the municipal sector.

The judiciary and economic development are tied together, not always in the nicest or the most comfortable manner. One tends to bump into the other when interpretations of a bylaw or a regulation is needed. That bumping into each other has kept the city’s legal department busy

Trucks dumped tonnes of land fill on the air park site without having a site alteration plan approved by the city.

There are people in Burlington who see very significant merit in their being a small well run airport in the rural part of the city.

Fill from the Air Park tumbles down a slope and rests against the property line fence of the Cousin’s farm on Appleby Line. Water run off has flooded parts of the farm.

Most of the residents in north Burlington don’t have a problem with the air park – they do have a problem with what the owner of the property wants to do with the almost 200 acres of land that had 500,000 tonnes of land fill dumped on it without permission or acceptable testing by the municipal government.

Business people, especially those in the development field, understand what they call the long game – find property that will increase in value and has significant development potential and invest in it. Developers look for that patient money; the site one which the Bridgewater condominiums are being built first came to the public eye when Mayrose Tyco assembled that land in 1985.
The air park has been around for a long time; for the past decade or more it has been a contentious operation. The owner has brought a unique business style to how he has chosen to develop the opportunity he feels the site has and in the process has alienated his neighbours and run afoul of the city and to a lesser degree the Regional government.

The development game has changed; it is a lot more collaborative and developers are learning that municipalities have strengths they have not utilized in the past.

And Burlington is beginning to realize that citizen groups do not have to be just reactive to things they do not like but can be proactive and advocate for levels of change.

In Burlington the Sustainability Advisory Committee has real clout and influence; Heritage issues were basically outsourced to the Heritage Advisory Committee who put together a program that council liked. When the outline of that program was first revealed city council came close to giving the advisory committee a standing ovation.

There is room and opportunity now for responsible citizens groups to do their homework and take well researched proposals to city council.

While it will be a bit of a challenge for this city council, the time is ripe for city councils to listen more closely to some of the ideas that are brought forward.

There are also new and more collaboratively minded city staff who are capable of listening to the people who provide the money to meet the payroll.

Municipalities are at that talking the talk when the mention transparency – citizens have chosen to believe what they said and now expect those people to walk their talk. Done properly it comes out as responsible government – on of the corner stones this province was built on.

All the key players in the Airpark dispute:

The time is not right yet to expect the kind of leadership that is needed from the elected officials; too much dead wood on the current Burlington council. But it is time and the opportunity is there for the private sector that is much more responsible than the development community has been in the past to quietly develop ideas and opportunities to advance potential

Getting any air park development in rural Burlington from economic developers is going to require more than just an initiative from the economic developers and consistent nudging from the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

The city itself has to realize the potential and want to see that potential grown and the people in rural Burlington are going to have to be a significant part of that process.

During a council chamber foyer conversation, city manager Jeff Fielding made it very clear to Glenn Grenier, second from the left that the city did not share his view that the Air Park did not have to comply with city bylaws. Grenier had positioned himself as a leading expert in aeronautical law and that the city should respect their rights. The city didn’t believe the Air Park actually had the rights they said they have; that view was upheld by both a Superior |Court judge and an Appeal Court decision. The city’s legal counsel stand to the right.

A very small percentage of the people in Burlington are fully aware of the current air park issue and the legal battle that has been going on for more than five years. The upside to that battle is that it hasn’t cost the city all that much – their legal counsel keeps winning the court cases and getting costs on a rather financially attractive basis. It isn’t a profit centre but it is a nice way to do business.

When the rural community became aware of what at was going on they did what every community does; they formed an organization – the Rural Burlington Greenbelt Coalition, which itself is a collection of citizen interest groups – and delegated to city hall – very effectively. Monte Dennis had years of experience battling the development of the once planned airport at Pickering; he was part of that crew that did everything possible to prevent the destruction of a community when the province expropriated hundreds of acres of land for an airport development in Pickering. That was 40 years ago – the houses and community are gone – but there is no airport in Pickering.

Vanessa Warren delegated to city council on the landfill work being done at the Air Park and the impact it will have on her property – and the larger community as well.

Monte Dennis delegating before city council.

If it wasn’t Dennis delegating for the RBGC at city hall or the Region, it would be Vanessa Warren who was always exceptionally well prepared: she tended to know more than anyone else in the room.

Despite the talent within the RBGC they have yet to capture the public imagination. A large part of that is their all but total reliance on social media to get their message out.

Social media has its place but it isn’t the silver bullet that always delivers.

Going forward one can hope that the RBGC people can learn to partner or at least collaborate with the better parts of the economic development community and make the best possible use of the air park property for both the land owner and the wider community without any development distorting or damaging the community.

Few in rural Burlington have a problem with a small private aircraft air park- many very close to the air park kind of like the sound of the light air craft landing and taking off.

Vince Rossi, believed to be the sole owner of the Air Park.

There are opportunities for some “good jobs” economic development at the air park. Small engine maintenance – even possibly some mid-size aircraft maintenance. Properly managed the air park could handle much more small craft traffic.

RBGC needs to be before city council regularly, prodding and poking and providing the visionary leadership that is badly needed. They certainly have the talent and if they are consistent they should over time bring about the shift that is needed.

One wonders where the Regional government is in all this. There are dozens of municipalities that oversee the operation of small airports in their communities. Neither the chair or the region’s administration appear to have much in the way of appetite for an air park in Halton and Burlington’s city council representatives at the Region have never been able to pull together as a single cohesive voice that takes a position and makes it stick.

There is much work to be done.

Could the air park already be in play without the owner even knowing about it?

Full disclosure:Pepper Parr, publisher of the |Gazette, Monte Dennis and Vanessa were sued by the Air Park Inc for libel in 2013. The case has yet to get to trial.

By Pepper Parr

August 4th, 2016

BURLINGTON, ON

This time two years ago thousands of families in the city were scrambling to recover from a rainfall that flooded their homes while the city moved into serious damage control mode.

The rain began in the early afternoon of the August holiday, it seemed at first, like just another summer rain storm but it shut down  the events at LaSalle Park where Joseph Brant Day was being celebrated.– at about 4 pm people began to realize there was a serious problem.

It was a holiday weekend and a lot of people were out of town. The Mayor was at his cottage, the acting city manager was at his cottage and out of cell phone reach. Then city general manager Scott Stewart was holding the fort and pulling in all the senior people he could find.

The data available several weeks after the storm showed just how local it was.

Tony Bavota, the fire chief, was getting reports but wasn’t experiencing as much as a drop of rain where he lived.

Underpasses were filling up with water.

Every creek in the east end of the city broke its banks pushing branches and tree stumps that became battering rams that did major damage.

The creeks on the east side of the city had burst their banks and could not manager the torrent of water that was roaring down.

Tuck Creek, Sheldon Creek along with the others in the eastern part of the had burst their banks and were doing significant damage.

There was very little in the way of media. The publisher of the Gazette was bailing water from the basement of the house he lived in.

The police at the Burlington detachment had to move all their vehicles to higher ground. Officers working at the desk had to walk on squishy floors.

The city got 191 mm of rain in just hours – most of it went looking for a place to flow – the creeks were a natural route to take.

Weeks after the event all kinds of data was available but the days of the flood and several days after that there was nothing but confusion.

Drivers found the water rising far more rapidly than they expected – many had to abandon vehicles.

The Region did move very quickly and made some short term funds available to several hundred people. The city turned to the province for help and learned about a thing called ODRAP –  Ontario Disaster Relied Aid Program that called for the city to declare there was an emergency and then create a committee to raise funds locally that would be matched on a two for one basis by the province.

The  program rules required the city to back away and let the local community organization handle the raising of funds.

Meanwhile the city began repairing the damage to the city infrastructure – the creeks has to be cleaned up, sidewalks that were literally lifted and moved yards down the road had to be repaired.  The city was responsible for fixing the infrastructure – social services was a regional responsibility.

Retired police officer Peter Hodgson took charge of the Red Cross effort which was to look at every home in the flood area and determine the level of damage.

The Red Cross was brought in to do the immediate survey work to determine what the damage was on a house by house basis.  The members of council for the east end of the city found themselves wading through basements with water up to their knees – but there wasn’t much else they could do.

The Burlington Community Foundation (BCF) was given the task of raising the funds needed  and in a short 100 days raised just shy of $1 million.

There was no missing the message – the city mobilized itself very quickly to help.

There were some delicate backroom differences of opinion between the city and the province over whether or not Burlington was going to get any provincial support.  Newly elected MPP Eleanor McMahon had an opportunity to deliver some choice words to her provincial government peers on what Burlington needed.

The BCF did superb work helping people fill in the appropriate forms and convince dozens of corporations to write cheques.  All but one of the major banks came through big time.  A major consumer products company, who shall go nameless, couldn’t find as much as a dime for the people that clog their store regularly.

Fortinos turned their fund raising software over to the community and had their cashiers asking for donations.

One of the supermarket chains made their back end computer system available for the collection of donations.

There were hundreds of small kind acts done.  One woman went door to door with green garbage bags offering to take in laundry for people who had lost their washers and driers.

One citizen found some warehouse space where donated furniture could be stored for those who would need it later.

The people of Elwood Street lined up to buy the cupcakes and the T shirts and the hot dogs to raise funds for their neighbours.

One street decided to hold what they thought was going to be a small fund raiser for a senior who needed some help – the Burlington Teen Tour Band came marching up the street the day of the event bringing tears to they eyes of man.

That small street managed to raise more in the way of real cash than one of the major service clubs.  The city was experiencing its citizens coming out to help.

There wasn’t an arm that Ron Foxcroft didn’t twist to raise the close to $1 million needed in a 100 day period.

Ron Foxcroft began to look like that Energizer bunny in the battery advertisements – he was everywhere chasing cheques and badgering people to add a couple of zeros to what they were giving.

What was remarkable about this natural event was that it ruined some families and at the same time people just blocks away experienced nothing.

It was like one of those tornadoes that ripped through a street, tore out five or six houses and left everything else standing.  The city had never experience anything like this before.

We learned that the downspouts that took rain from the eaves troughs were pouring water into a system of pipes that couldn’t manage the flow.  We leaned that those catch basis in back yards that had been covered by grass really were an important part of storm water management.

We learned that those swales between our houses were there for a purpose.

And we learned how to pull together as a community to help each other.

After some of the finest work any community organization has done – the Burlington Community Foundation did a re-branding and  took the word community out of their corporate name – go figure.