TREE CUTTING AT NICKLE BEACH A CONCERN FOR PORT RESIDENT

AREA WAS HABITAT TO DEER, OTHER ANIMALS, ANNETTE PAIEMENT SAYS

Annette Paiement was walking her dog near Nickel Beach late last week when she noticed something was not right.

To her dismay, a small woodlot along Lake Road leading to the beach had been razed. As it turns out, the city was — to paraphrase Joni Mitchell — tearing down a bit of paradise to put up a parking lot.

"I've been walking on the beach every single day and I've been seeing them working," Paiement said. "The first thing that happened was I noticed some trees down on the ground."

She is concerned that the clear-cutting — taking place at two separate locations along Lake Road — will impact local wildlife.

"There's been no consideration on how the parking lots are going to affect other things," Paiement said. "There's been deer, and that is a habitat to a number of animals."

The sites where trees have been removed are at the entrance to the beach another to the west on the south side of Lake. The site near the entrance was cleared to make space for washroom/changing area trailers while the larger site is to be used as a parking lot for beach patrons. Construction of the lot became necessary after the Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks told city officials cars could no longer allow visitors to park on the beach due to the presence of the endangered Fowler's toad.

The decision build the $1.3-million parking lot was approved by council on

Feb. 28, said Port Colborne chief administrative officer Scott Luey. He acknowledged the decision and the subsequent work at the sites have been causing a stir and admitted the city has been getting "a lot of calls and emails" once the tree removal commenced.

"We had people saying it was an old growth forest," Luey said. "It's not. To us it was a bush lot (the parking lot site) with overgrown shrubbery and scrub brush."

Between the two sites there were 67 trees with most (55) being cleared from the parking lot site. Luey said precautions were taken before work started because it was an area where Fowler's toad could be found.

"That's the sand dune and the water's edge," Luey said.

He added that the trees that were cut down would be replaced, some at the site and in other parks around the city. Currently, the city has an inventory of 2,000 trees and it is in the process of creating an Urban Forest Management

Plan. That plan should be completed by June.

Paiement, meanwhile, said she feels the city moved ahead with the project with no real consultation with the community.

"They missed an opportunity to consult with the community, to beautify, to create sort of a more beautiful sort of area," she said.

She said there is another plot of land that was largely devoid of trees that could have been used for the parking lot, although it is further away from the beach entrance.

"They could have done a shuttle service," Paiement said. "They could utilize that other area without taking up the trees there."

She added that erosion and algae blooms are a concern for the lake and that the city had a chance to show good environmental stewardship.

"They had missed an opportunity to create some sort of stewardship for the area to plant and to plant grasses to help with the erosion, which is a serious problem along the beach," she said. "They could have brought Indigenous people in to consult about the land because it is treaty-free territory."

Despite multiple request for comment, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry did not respond by publication time.

Luey said there could have been better communication. He said the city posted notices on its social media channels.

"We tried as much as we could with social media," he said. "We issued a press release."

One thing that wasn't done was to post information at the site itself.

"Maybe we could have put up a sign," he said.