Ottawa City Council - Do the right thing and protect the Kizell Pond Wetlands area

I am writing to urge that City Council act quickly and vote to incorporate the Kizell Pond Wetland as a Provincially Significant Wetland in the Official Plan and thereby halt plans by KNL (Urbandale and Richcraft) to develop adjacent lands and dump storm water into the pond.

Several facts must be considered as Council makes its decision on Kizell Pond:

1.      KNL’s plans for water diversion will raise water levels in Kizell wetland by 1 metre!   According to KNL’s own subdivision plans this water would be robbed from Shirley’s Brook and routed to flow down through Beaver Pond and Kizell/Watts Creek.  This will cause massive flooding in Kanata Lakes & Beaverbrook, erosion, and ecosystem destruction of the last 2 cool water streams in the Greenbelt.  (Recent studies by the NCC confirm that Kizell/Watts Creek and Shirley’s Brook are the only 2 cool water streams left in the Greenbelt).

2.      The city’s own senior environmental staff strongly oppose any diversion of storm water by KNL into to Kizell Pond for sound environmental reasons.  This is a problem because the south side of Kizell is already used as a storm water dumping ground, and KNL wants to dump more storm water into Kizell as they develop the north side in future.  Putting aside flooding and downstream impacts, the damage to Kizell wetland alone is not permitted by provincial environmental protection laws. 

3.      The city must act and respect provincial environmental protection laws. KNL cannot proceed with any of the subdivision development phases without dumping more storm water into either Beaver Pond, or Kizell 

It would be a travesty of the city’s own Official Plan which promises protection for provincially significant natural heritage and which already identifies Kizell wetland as a Natural Heritage feature and has done so since 1972.  The OMB ruling in 1985 that moved this portion of the SMH into the urban boundary did not remove the official Natural Heritage designation of Kizell, nor did it remove the Candidate ANSI status of the land around it. 

Research conducted on this issue can be downloaded from

http://www.renaud.ca/public/Water_Related/Kizell-Wetland-Issues/

This research shows that there were serious gaps in the engineering studies that were submitted and that KNL did not implement the energy dissipaters and containment ponds that they were supposed to.  In other words, the info submitted in support of the approval described a situation which did not exist.

Meanwhile the city refuses to release to documentation gathered during Phase 1 of the EA on Water Diversion even though this info has been complete since mid-April. This lack of transparency by the city to release this information has forced members of the public to file access to information. Will this information, once released, show just how serious impact caused by those gaps in the prior engineering studies were? 

Its time to do the right thing and vote to protect the Kizell Pond Wetland.