Big turnout for meeting to update plans for HRM wilderness park
Posted Jun 1, 2012 06:58:39 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A public meeting hosted by HRM officials to update the vision for a massive wilderness park drew a large and mostly supportive crowd Thursday evening.
The municipality revealed its draft design for the Blue Mountain Birch Cove Lakes Wilderness Area at Saint Peter’s Church and got a warm reception.
“This vision you’ve laid out today would make this perhaps one of the greatest parks in any nation, certainly in our nation. So, thank you,” Ray Plourde, wilderness coordinator at the Ecology Action Centre, said during the meeting.
Mary-Ann McGraw, chair of the Kearney Lake Residents Association was thrilled at what she saw.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she told the hosts. “Personally, this is an over 10-year wait. I’m a really happy girl to see this moving.”
The planned park will include 22 lakes, countless wetlands, a wildlife corridor and lands stretching from the edge of the Bayers Lake Industrial Park to the edge of Upper Tantallon.
The plan is to have near-country and back-country wilderness.
As HRM’s Peter Bigelow pointed out the big obstacle remaining is acquiring all the land.
“So what can we do, the assembled here today, to help it make that happen and move along more quickly?” asked one man in the audience.
“You’re doing it now,” said Bigelow. “We need answers to these questions. We have to take back feedback to council.”
The project has been a long time in the making. HRM’s regional plan imagined the park in 2006 and the province protected land in 2009.
HRM said anyone wanting to give input on the planning process can contact Halifax.ca.
