BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to a story titled 'City says $24.4M project will allow Barrie to weather storm,' published July 7.
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We should be under no illusions regarding the comments of Mayor Jeff Lehman, as reported in BarrieToday of July 7. During the official opening of the Dunlop Street-Kidd’s Creek culvert improvements, he maintained that the now-opened and widened channel “ultimately protects public safety and property and helps to improve the water quality of Lake Simcoe.”
Surprisingly, Kenneth Cheney, engineering director with Lake Simcoe Region Conservation Authority, chimed in with: “It will deliver on reduced flooding, improved wildlife habitat, a more beautiful view and a healthier Lake Simcoe watershed for us all.”
But nothing could be further from the truth, for the volume of turgid and polluted stormwater that pours down this watercourse with every passing rainstorm remains the same. And nowhere do I see any mention of fish, let alone the brook trout, long since extirpated from this once-pristine stream. Indeed, over a century of civic negligence has led to the elimination of this species from every one of the 10 creeks that flow into Kempenfelt Bay.
During the 1950s, Bill Stewart, former owner of the Knights Inn [which was demolished to make way for the Kidd's Creek project], built two ponds that supported as many as 1,000 trout fingerlings. W. A. Fisher, in the ravine behind 45 Sunnidale Rd., also constructed a pond that sustained as many as two dozen trout up to a foot long. And, believe it or not, even as late as the 1920s, people fished for trout in Queen’s Park!
Today, the $24 million spent on Dunlop Street will do nothing for Kidd’s Creek itself. It should have been a forgone conclusion when no provision was made for the vast accumulation of stormwater from all of the development above Cundles Road and Lillian Crescent in the 1970s.
Instead it was all routed into the headwater springs of Kidd’s Creek, just below Cundles Road, where watercress once grew and brook trout spawned.
The result is a totally devastated creek, eroded and gutted all the way to Wellington Street. Below that the city has already spent millions on armour-stoning and culverts through the residential area to this latest massive monument of concrete.
Until this stormwater is properly controlled at the source, there is no hope for Kidd’s Creek. Call it what it is — a sewer.
Mark Fisher
Barrie
