A brick manufacturer is dusting off a 44-year-old licence to extend its quarry into a Burlington forest, clear-cutting an estimated 9,000 trees and butting up against residents’ backyards as early as next year.

Neighbours and environmental advocates say the expanded operation could jeopardize their health and a sensitive local ecosystem.

“That licence that was given back in the ’70s does not take into account all that we know about dust, about noise, about flora and fauna,” said David Adcock, who lives on Westhaven Dr. The street is home to about 85 properties, more than half of which back onto a 16-hectare forest owned by Forterra Brick.

“It seems short-sighted at best,” Adcock said.

The dispute pits a small group of Halton homeowners against North America’s largest brick producer, underscoring the issue of “dormant licences” and a clash of interests arising from old industrial areas now fenced in by subdivisions.

Forterra cites its mitigation and rehabilitation plan, still in the works. It also points to dust and noise studies from the 1990s, commissioned by the developer of the then-nonexistent housing subdivision and approved by the Ontario Municipal Board.

“The impact of (potentially toxic) dust emissions on the proposed development is deemed minimal, even when the extraction takes place in the area adjacent,” the dust study states.

Ian Keaveny and Fernand Coderre, both part of the Tyandaga Environmental Coalition, a neighbourhood non-profit, say they were blindsided when the company alerted them last year to the planned extension of the Aldershot Quarry.

“Like many people here, we moved into the neighbourhood because of the green space,” Keaveny said. “Now that will be ripped out.”

Keaveny said the only 30-metre buffer between backyards and future brick operations poses a potential health issue, despite the dust study findings.

“The big tragedy is 35 prime acres of forest being destroyed,” added neighbour Coderre, after a stroll along the site’s still-leafy perimeter.

Lawyer David Donnelly, who represents the Tyandaga Environmental Coalition, said the standoff “exposes a tremendous gap in the environmental protection scheme” in Ontario and draws attention to “dormant licences.”

“There’s this unfortunate practice of putting environmental features at risk simply because there’s a grandfathered 30- or 40-year old approval,” Donnelly said.

“It’s a problem,” Environmental Defence program director Keith Brooks said of the sleeper licences.

Aggregate licence applications from a half-century ago carried “much less stringent” criteria for green protection, he says. They continue to be one of the few environmental regulatory approval processes in Ontario without an end-date or review cycle, according to the Canadian Environmental Law Association.

Graham Flint, president of Gravel Watch Ontario, says the lack of an expiration date on Ontario aggregate licences can also result in “land-banking” — buying up land and licensing it but holding off on extraction until suburban sprawl stretches closer to the site, yielding lower transport costs for the company.

Residents near a gravel pit in Paris, Ont., have fought an operation there beginning before 2014, when it launched based on a licence dating back to the mid-1970s.

Endangered species such as the Jefferson salamander and the American columbo plant exist in the surrounding area and probably inside the fated woodlot, according to the Cootes to Escarpment EcoPark System coalition.

The brick company says it retained an environmental consultant to catalogue the local vegetation and wildlife. Some plants may be transplanted, “where feasible,” to protected areas of the quarry site, which borders Halton conservation lands, says Forterra lawyer Ronald Webb.

Asked if the company would consider a more thorough environmental assessment or a cultural heritage study — now incorporated into all aggregate licence applications — Webb said: “I think the answer is no. That is because of the fact that the licence exists and will continue to exist.”

The quarry’s site plan is line with existing legislation — the province’s Aggregate Resources Act has been under review since 2013 without changes, though a blueprint emerged last year — as well as Ontario’s Greenbelt Plan, according to Forterra.

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As a way forward, Brooks points to the Cornerstone Standards Council, modelled after the Forest Stewardship Council and launched last year. So far only one quarry, in the Acton area of Halton Hills, has submitted to the green-conscious criteria needed for council certification, a voluntary process comparable to LEED certification.

The Burlington quarry predates the nearby residents by generations. The Aldershot site has been in operation under successive owners since the 1920s, with a single licence issued under the Pits and Quarries Control Act in 1972 and handed down since then.

Forterra Brick manufactures more than half of the clay brick produced in Canada, with roughly one-quarter coming from the shale reserves in Burlington, according to the City of Burlington.

“We’re committed to balancing environmental protection and community health with Ontario’s need for aggregate resources,” said Natural Resources spokesperson Jolanta Kowalski in an email. “The ministry is not aware of any health concerns at this time.”

Asked if local plant and animal species would be protected during excavation, the ministry responded: “Extraction in the eastern cell can occur under the existing approval.”

“After extensive review by staff in several city and regional departments, we have come to understand that Forterra Brick is within its legal rights,” said Burlington Mayor Rick Goldring and local councillor Rick Craven, in a joint statement.

Forterra met with residents in September 2015 and plans to meet again Thursday about the impending expansion, expected to begin sometime in 2017, the company’s lawyer said.

Neighbourhood residents acknowledge tension is almost inevitable when industry abuts residential zoning.

“I’m not sure that years ago they were really thinking through the implications of that, when you co-locate and amend the official city plan to permit housing to go right next to an existing operator with a licence to expand,” said Adcock. “This at some level was a train coming down the track.

“We’re not trying to say we don’t want to talk,” he said. “We’re saying, let’s have a pause.”

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Fine print

In 1998, the Ontario Municipal Board required that a warning clause about the possibility of an expanded next-door quarry appear on residents’ property titles and the offers of sale and purchase.

No such statement about the “future extractive industrial land use to the west” ever made it onto the page of those documents.

The only reference to the fact the forest behind their homes could soon be stripped of greenery and shovelled for shale was buried on page 23 of the 24-page subdivision agreement between the City of Burlington and developer Jannock Properties, now dissolved.

A registration number printed on the titles alludes to the 1998 subdivision agreement, accessible for a fee at a Halton Land Registry office.

“We had no idea this was coming down the pipe,” said resident Fran Fendelet.

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