A longtime Stirling-Rawdon resident is at loggerheads with council regarding stormwater running off on to his property in the village.
Wayne Martin appeared before Stirling-Rawdon’s Environmental Committee asking, not for the first time, that the municipality
do something about the stormwater draining down the southern part of Holly Drive on to his vacant property which he puchased not long ago.
Holly Drive is east of Farmtown Park and is a short street which dead ends at Martin’s property.
Martin says the storm-water and snow-melt has continuously formed a pond on his property and Lower Trent Region Conservation has deemed that part of his property a “provincially significant wetland”.
This means that part of the property must be left alone, and more importantly, from Martin’s point of view, the “wetland” means
there can be no road onto his property from Holly Drive.
Martin told the committee that he had no plans to develop the property, but someone else in the future might, but now the land has little value to anyone looking to develop it.
Martin called the “provincially significant wetland” designation laughable. He said what he actually had at the end of Holly Drive was a municipal “storm-water retention pond” that the municipality was causing with it’s drainage design.
He wants council approve work to change how the water flows in the neighborhood.
On the other side of the table, Chief Operator of Water and Wastewater, Matthew Richmond said he understood Martin’s concerns, but the drainage pattern off of Holly Drive was set decades ago in the 70’s when the neighborhood began to be built.
The drainage now occurring was nothing new and well established.
Richmond added he believed if any work was to be done in that part of the village, there would have to first be an engineered drainage study done for the wider area before anything could be done properly to pave the way for more development.
Richmond said the project would be a costly one, and that it was not a priority for the municipality in the forseeable future.
As an example, Richmond said storm-water issues in the Stirling’s downtown were becoming a public hazard, and had to be a priority that would cost significant dollars.
Mayor Rodney Cooney told Martin that council didn’t have a lot of cash to play with and wished him luck trying to get the “provincially significant wetland” designation changed.
Martin said he’d spent a lot of time trying to change the views of both council and Lower Trent but was running out of patience, and without actually suggesting legal action, said it was time “to draw a line in the sand”.
Committee members and Martin agreed to disagree, and no action was taken.