Watershed protection at the grassroots level.
By Harry van Bommel
Ontario’s first comprehensive, citizen-led plan to regenerate a watershed was recently launched by a unique community group that engages neighbourhood organizations and businesses in celebrating and protecting Toronto’s Taylor Massey Creek.
Over the last six years, the Taylor Massey Project (TMP) has staged 67 events. With an annual budget of about $1,000, the collective efforts of the TMP and its more-than 20 partners have involved 3,458 participants. Volunteers have picked up over 1,300 bags of litter and planted 3,550 trees and shrubs, the vast majority of which was provided by the City of Toronto. Over the same period, the TMP has also made 21 submissions to government agencies.
The TMP’s most recent submission is Reach by Reach, a 49-page plan that provides both strategic recommendations to four levels of government as well as details on regenerating the Taylor Massey watershed to the fullest extent possible, including detailed maps.
It’s an impressive effort for a local group of volunteers. The report is based on the TMP’s four principles of watershed regeneration: (1) a detailed summary of the sub-watershed’s current conditions; (2) a vision for a revitalized creek; (3) suggestions for improved agency performance on watershed management; and (4) specific suggestions to protect water quality, regenerate the creek, and establish trail throughout the sub-watershed.
Following detailed summaries of the conditions in each of the major sections or reaches of the watershed, the TMP report summarizes its suggested actions as immediate, secondary, and long-term priorities, and calls for $4,275,000 to be spent on the top five priorities over five years.
This huge effort by a small organization goes back many years. In 1992, a watershed plan from the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority (TRCA), Forty Steps to a New Don, identified that Taylor Massey Creek contributed about 80 per cent of the pollutants to Toronto’s Don River “under some flow conditions,” although it only supplies about five per cent of the flow to the Don.
Forty Steps and other studies also revealed that Taylor Massey Creek has been drained of all of its natural wetlands and has the highest percentage of impervious pavement of any local watershed-2.4 of its 15 kilometres is either a concrete channel or underground pipe. It also has the smallest percentages of both overall green space and forested lands of any sub-watershed in the Don.
The TMP was launched in 2003 to bring the community together to build and protect the watershed from the ground up. As expressed in Reach by Reach, “Taylor Massey Creek is the most polluted and degraded tributary of the Don River, the most polluted river in Ontario.” The hopeful news, however, is that many of the people who live along its banks love the potential of this little creek and its accompanying ravines, forests, and meadows, and have a vision for its regeneration.
Over the last few years, the City of Toronto has made great strides to protect local ravines and address some water quality issues. It has adopted new ravine and sewer-use bylaws, banned the cosmetic use of pesticides, is making an effort to identify and eliminate cross connections that put human sewage into storm pipes in dry weather, and is developing a 25-year, $1-billion wet-weather flow plan to eliminate sanitary flow to the creek from combined sewers.
While the TMP acknowledges these efforts, it notes that a recent national inventory ranked the Don as the fourth most polluted river in Canada, and that Taylor Massey Creek has not had a water sample meet the provincial water quality objectives for e-coli for at least three years.
As a result, Reach by Reach calls for a national water strategy, renewed federal and provincial efforts to protect the Great Lakes, an adequacy assessment of current provincial water quality objectives, renewed commitment from the TRCA to water quality and standardized watershed report cards, and the implementation of the City of Toronto’s $1 billion wet-weather flow master plan.
While overall water quality is a priority, Reach by Reach is also focused on regenerating the watershed one reach at a time. As a result, it contains a level of detail never previously expressed by a community organization in which the challenges of each reach are described, supported by geodetically-accurate drawings created by volunteer Rebecca Ma.
In addition, each reach is assessed against three categories: (1) water and wetlands; (2) terrestrial natural heritage; and (3) trails, signage, and community engagement.
The details are important, says TMP founding chair Andrew McCammon. Currently, the TRCA is updating its 1992 plan for the Don. “The current draft of the Don Plan provides an inspiring, high-level vision of the watershed, urging smart growth, municipal Conservation Authority cooperation, the adoption of green technologies ranging from expanded mass transit to energy-efficient buildings, and six regeneration concept sites for the Don watershed,” says McCammon. “Nonetheless, it falls short on implementation details and would not result in the full regeneration of any of the Don’s three main tributaries, let alone the whole watershed.”
Nancy Penny, TMP chair continues: “To complement the new Don Plan, Reach by Reach shines a light on how to implement the regeneration of a full sub-watershed, augmenting the six concept sites being proposed in the new Don Plan with a systematic approach for the regeneration of Taylor Massey Creek-protecting water quality, remediating our ravines, linking our neighbourhoods, and facilitating the transition to sustainable development through enhanced community stewardship initiatives.”
The top five priorities with the TMP’s cost estimates are:
1. The Warden Hydro Corridor: Revamping this abandoned hydro corridor into a five-kilometre green space with both pedestrian and cycling trail as well as the planting of 200,000 trees and shrubs to add a full percentage to the watershed’s forest inventory – $1,850,000.
2. Terraview Willowfield: The completion of a work begun in the 1990s, providing for improved storm-water treatment and the replacement of 400 metres of concrete channel – $750,00.
3. The Eglinton Reach: Extensive repairs to eroding banks, the regeneration of a section of floodplain, and the installation of two pedestrian bridges over the creek and one over a railroad track – $675,000.
4. The Underwriters Reach: The remediation of perched culverts, installing an oil and grit separator if needed, formalizing the trail, the possible installation of an underground tunnel (budgeted within the wet weather flow master plan), and the establishment of a local corporate community stewardship program – $300,000.
5. Warden Woods Park: The creation of Friends of Warden Woods as a local community stewardship program with four local neighbourhood associations, local businesses, and the management and tenants of several apartment building to develop and implement a plan to improve lot management practices, eliminate invasive species and expand pocket wetlands – $700,000.
For the investment of $4,275,00 over five years, Reach by Reach would result in more than five kilometres of separate bike and walking trails, the addition of one per cent to the forest cover of the sub-watershed, the regeneration of four degraded reaches, and the creation of two community stewardship groups as models of future, similar, community engagement initiatives.
One final aspect about the plan underscores the TMP’s commitment to its community: it is a draft. The TMP will discuss the draft with the City of Toronto and the TRCA and take it to public meetings with its members in the new year. The final version of the plan will be tabled in 2009.
Harry van Bommel is the author of 37 books and over a hundred articles.
