Help us prevent the Hanlon Creek Business Park. Let's learn how to support each other and build safer, healthier, stronger communities that care about people and the land.
Get in touch with us via email at guelphlimits@gmail.com with any ideas, insights, or questions. Meet us in person at meetings each Monday, at 7pm, at Fresh Start, at 40 Baker St.
There are really so many ways you can help:
Come out on a walk of the land and learn about tree and plant identification, forest ecology, old growth trees, the local bioregion, and more. If you'd like, we can help you learn what you'd need to know to give walking tours of the land to others.
Or maybe you are especially knowledgeable about plants, birds, wetlands, and so on, and you'd like to take people out and support our efforts.
Hook us up with any opportunity to talk about these issues in your school, at your religious center, youth group, potluck, workplace, organization, radio show, etc. etc.
Offer us a place to distribute flyers, or learn with us about the issues so you can go around your neighbourhood and talk with people about it, and handout flyers. It's a great way to get to know people and learn a lot....
Tell your friends and family, fellow workers, and anyone else, about this stuff.
Educate us about what you're involved with.
Because the City of Guelph is the main landowner with the HCBP, with a 63% stake in the land, the mayor and councilors have the ability to cancel the development and re-designate the land for other purposes. In cases like this, it is possible for public pressure to work. We urge you to let the mayor and your councilors know your feelings about this development.
Mayor Karen Farbridge
mayor@guelph.caWard 1
Ward 2
Ward 3
Ward 4
Ward 5
Ward 6
christine.billings@guelph.caSome examples of letters people have been writing in:
Business park proposal needs some rethinking
May 20, 2009
Hugh Whitely
In regard to Guelph city council re-revising the capital budget, councillors should use this opportunity to correct major allocation errors.
The current budget allocates $37.5 million to roads and other infrastructure for the Hanlon Creek Business Park. In the current economy it is folly for the City of Guelph to spend this huge amount on an expensive, difficult-to-market and slow-to-develop greenfield site. The business park project soaks up virtually all the capital available for economic development for the next 10 years.
There are 1.3 million square feet of empty fully serviced industrial buildings in Guelph, not counting buildings available for reuse on the Ontario Reformatory grounds. Many hectares of serviced brownfield sites await rehabilitation.
A carefully crafted program of multiple small-scale capital expenditures to assist site-specific adaptive reuse of existing buildings, and to rehabilitate brownfield sites, is the better way. This strategy can yield big returns in a timely fashion and provide the needed opportunities for sustainable employment for city residents.
Dumping all economic stimulus money into the business park will produce only expensive empty lots -- with little prospect of take-up for at least the next decade.
One compelling reason for delaying the Hanlon business park is the time this gives to correct the design of the gargantuan interchange proposed by the Ministry of Transportation for the Hanlon at Laird. The six-lane monstrosity the ministry proposes for Laird will cost the City of Guelph at least $16 million.
A utilitarian interchange patterned after the traditional, fully-functional interchange of County Road 46/Highway 6 with 401 would save the city $6 million or perhaps more.
The Laird interchange, if needed at all, will never handle anything like the traffic currently using the Aberfoyle interchange.
Oversizing the Laird interchange is a huge waste of money, but one that is easy to correct. Replacing, for at least the short term, the outdated Hanlon Creek Business Park model with a dynamic economic development initiative focused on reuse is harder but within the grasp of an imaginative council.
Hugh Whitely, Guelph
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Put a stop to Hanlon Creek business park
May 19, 2009
Kim Henderson
Dear Editor - I've lived in Guelph longer than I've lived anywhere else. My family's from here. I am one of a growing number of people who were once proud to call Guelph home, but we are rapidly becoming disillusioned with the direction this city is going.
The most pertinent issue regarding the demise of our city as an environmental and social leader is the Hanlon Creek Business Park.
It is widely acknowledged that the "greenest" building is one that is reused, or built in an already developed area. Given that there are 175 brownfields, abundant "for lease" and "for sale" signs all over Guelph's existing industrial areas, the Southgate Business Park set to come online, and the economy is in decline, how can the mayor and council justify building yet another industrial park -- especially one this large, which surrounds Guelph's last old-growth forest and a provincially significant wetland. It will threaten the Paris-Galt moraine, and potentially open up our drinking water to risk of further contamination?
There are no tenants signed on for the Hanlon park, yet they want to start construction this summer. The economic and ecological models used to justify it are just that -- models. Models have proven time and again to not work, and there is simply no way, no matter how many "experts" they have on their side, to guarantee a safe water supply, or a long-standing old-growth forest.
I urge the mayor and council to bring the Hanlon Creek Business Park back for another look and another vote. This issue has received more public outcry than nearly any other environmental issue in recent years.
Stop this madness. Your constituents are watching, and they do not want to see the bulldozers roll in.
Kim Henderson, Guelph
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Hanlon business park is a threat to us all
May 13, 2009
Betty Kowall
Dear Editor - Whether or not the Jefferson salamander species does or doesn't exist within the boundaries of the proposed Hanlon Creek Business Park is not the central issue.
Many other species, including salamanders, living on this site will be decimated by the proposed industrial park plan. They include, among other things, a magnificent old-growth forest, which cannot be replaced by planting new trees.
What about the birds with established nesting sites? The amphibians, reptiles and mammals in this area have a right to not be killed in the interest of building another industrial park, which Guelph does not need.
What the people of Guelph need is a naturally beautiful area to enjoy -- an area free of boaters and campers, dedicated to preserving the natural environment and beauty that was once what Guelph mainly consisted of.
Protecting our environment should be our priority. Ask any school-aged child and they will tell you that. What will we be leaving for future generations if this industrial park goes ahead? More deserted industrial buildings and parking lots. We have enough of those already.
Put the industrial park somewhere else.
We need to say, NO!
Betty Kowall, Guelph
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Project would destroy important natural area
April 15, 2009
Judy Martin
Dear Editor - I am surprised and disappointed that the city's manager of economic development would accuse those of us raising concerns about the Hanlon Creek Business Park of spreading misinformation about the proposal -- specifically about the loss of trees, the paving over of the natural area, and the potential impacts on groundwater.
Our information is taken directly from reports done by the city. For example, the environmental implementation report states very clearly that 1,700 mature trees, and 33 acres of tree canopy will be removed as a result of this development. At maturity, in 30-plus years, the Rotary forest at the Guelph Lake conservation area has the potential to provide 99 acres of tree canopy. So, in the Hanlon Creek development, we will be bulldozing existing canopy equal to one-third of that which will only eventually be provided when the Rotary trees reach maturity. How does that make sense?
We are also concerned about the amount of pavement and hard surfaces that will cover the land, including the Paris moraine, on this site. On the 675-acre site, about 85 acres are provincially protected wetland and another 150 acres or so will be storm water ponds or buffers, which will leave about 440 acres for development. The environmental report shows that between 374 and 396 acres will be paved over.
We have serious concerns that this high-quality natural area will be severely degraded if this development proceeds as planned.
Judy Martin, Sierra Club, Guelph
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Industrial park plan will be bad for the bees
April 08, 2009
Richard Chaloner
Dear Editor - Re: Bee Prepared -- March 28
Guelph should be proud of the efforts to provide habitat for dwindling populations of pollinators. But what we seem to be providing with one hand, we're taking away with the other.
According to the article, "farmers often get rid of hedgerows, where many pollinators live and feed between crops." The site of the proposed 675-acre Hanlon Creek Business Park in the south end of Guelph has some 60 hedgerows with thousands of trees covering about 33 acres of land.
If hedgerows are prime pollinator habitat, why is the city proposing to remove them all in order to put an industrial development there?
If this invaluable land must be developed, surely progressive development would ensure that most of these features could be retained.
We need to take more care in the way we develop the land. Pollinators are "keystone species," which means their decline can collapse an ecosystem. While it's great that we're developing a big pollinator park on the Eastview landfill site, it's even more important to protect pollinator habitat that already exists within the city.
Richard Chaloner, Guelph
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Time to reconsider Hanlon business park
March 19, 2009
Khalid Mohamed
Dear Editor - Re: " 'These are all going to be destroyed'; Developing business at cost of trees, wetlands not worth it, group says; city says steps taken to protect natural areas" (Guelph Mercury, Feb. 28).
"Business development" at the expense of critical wetlands, old-growth maples and wildlife habitat makes absolutely no sense and to hide poor policy behind an "employment" strategy is laughable.
It makes no sense to leave industrial "brownfields" and factory lots empty and it makes even less sense to refuse to redevelop an existing site. We are in a time where we know that the demand for industrial and commercial space will be in decline. If anything, more of this space already in use will become vacant. We certainly don't need more sprawl when we cannot even use what is already there.
It seems as if there has always been the plan to build the Hanlon Creek Business Park. The first environmental impact study was done as early as 2000 and construction was supposed to begin in 2002. Community groups have opposed the project and the destruction of part of the Paris moraine for years.
It makes no sense to "give" inadequate buffer zones or wildlife corridors to this development as a "solution." A real strategy would be to look at what we know will become unused because of the economic slowdown, not to push through a controversial development as "employment lands."
Development at any cost is never a strategy, but when it comes at the expense of leaving a legacy of sprawl and pollution it is never acceptable.
Khalid Mohamed, Guelph
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It's not too late to stop the bulldozers
March 05, 2009
Mike Darmon
Dear Editor - I have had the privilege of working with LIMITS (Land Is More Important Than Sprawl), a group of mostly young people who are concerned with the development of the Hanlon Creek Business Park.
It is refreshing to see our youth willing to fight something that could threaten our limited groundwater source, reduce our tree canopy and damage our sensitive wetlands and wildlife, all of which the city has promised to protect.
These young people are not radicals.
They have spoken with city staff, written to the mayor, spoken to the media and spent many hours doing their research.
The Hanlon Creek Business Park is supposed to be a green development, but as usual maximum profit rules over maximum protection of our planet.
These lands should never be developed, but if they are, we need to enhance -- not minimize - the recommended buffers.
Time is running out, but it is not too late to stop the bulldozers that will flatten this gently rolling land.
Please talk to your councillors and write to the newspapers about your concerns. And please give our youth hope for their future and the belief that their voice can make a difference.
Mike Darmon, Guelph
