Request for Additional 10 Sites Denied

Property is within the floodway of the Trent River

Installation of an on-site sewage system Would Give the Green Light to Additional Sites

Article by John Campbell

Trent Hills - Fri., Oct. 21, 2002 -Trent Hills council has denied an application by Island Park RV Resort for a zoning amendment that would have allowed the park to add another 10 trailer sites to the 201 it currently operates.

The park’s expansion was opposed by neighbouring property owners as well as Lower Trent Conservation.

Jim Peters, far right

“Based on all the input received and consideration of all the applicable planning policies it is the view of Planning staff that the application should be denied,” Trent Hills Director of Planning and Development Jim Peters wrote in a report to council last month recommending the application be turned down.

Janet Noyes, Lower Trent Conservation’s manager of development services and water resources, and Ashley Anastasio, an environmental planner, said the agency “cannot support an increase” in the park’s density because the entire property “is within the floodway of the Trent River” and a “majority” of it is within provincially significant wetland (Wilson Island East).

Two of the park’s neighbours, Robert Hall and Laurie Roy, who have long fought the park’s expansion and been highly critical of its operations, reiterated their opposition to having more sites added.

When the application was the subject of a public hearing last spring, Hall responded in an email that allowing more sites is “foolhardy,” because the park’s previous expansion efforts had destroyed wetlands and damaged the surrounding area while “diminishing the quality of life for so many.”

Roy said the application should be denied for several reasons, including “the presence of floodplain, the inability to provide safe access and/or adequate floodproofing for development, and the increased negative impacts to the adjacent PSW [provincially significant wetland].”
“Allowing further development has the potential to increase risk of life and property and/or aggravate the existing natural hazards,” she stated in an email she submitted with Duane Turner.

A senior environmental officer with the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks’ Peterborough District Office, John Crouter, had noted in an email to Peters that the ministry had authorized the park last year to install an on-site sewage system that could service up to 211 trailer sites as well as a three-bedroom house and a public washroom.

The Environmental Compliance Approval issued July 16, 2021 gave the park’s owner up to three years to install the system.
Once the proposed sewage system is installed and operating, the addition of another 10 sites to the 201 that already exist “would be in accordance with the ECA and no amendment would be required,” Crouter stated. To add the sites before then would be a violation of the Ontario Water Resources Act, he said.

The authorization came about as a result of a Local Planning Approval Tribunal decision which upheld an earlier zoning change which led to a site plan being approved that outlined a series of improvements.

The park currently discharges its sewage into a lagoon north of the trailer park on the same property.

Bob Clark, the planner hired by Island Park owner Jerry Luczynski to make the case for expansion, said “further consideration” of the sewage disposal options put forward and approved now favours relocating the septic bed from along the Trent River to the northern end of the resort to receive effluent from the mechanical treatment facility, which would be located within lands zoned for the resort.

The “redesign of the sewage system represents an improvement to the operation of the site” and “frees up lands to be used for other uses including recreation and additional RV sites,” Clark said.

Councillor Gene Brahaney said the park’s expansion bid has been a “hot topic” at Lower Trent, which has “spent a lot of time dealing with the (park’s owner) over the years.”“They’re not going to allow any more additions until the septic system is up and running,” he told council in September.

Peters said “the dispersal bed for the sanitary system has been three-quarters constructed, if not more, (and is) quite an impressive site … above the floodplain.”

Peters said in his report that the approvals previously granted Island Park “were for existing development and to implement regulations that would protect and restore” provincially significant wetland.

“The current proposal represents new development,” and should not be considered, he said.

RV resort image from Marina.com