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SYDNEY, N.S. —

It’s happy trails for a group of Cape Breton Regional Municipality residents who have been fighting to save a popular system of pathways and the urban forest that surrounds it.

On Wednesday, members of Save the Baille Ard Forest and the Baille Ard Recreation Association met with CBRM staff and engineers from CBCL Ltd. to discuss changes to the municipality’s flood prevention plan for the area.

Wayne McKay, who formed the Save the Baille Ard Forest group, said the meeting went “surprisingly well.” While he didn’t attend, he said people who were at the meeting reported that the CBRM drastically altered its preliminary plan, which called for as many as eight large embankments, or berms — each eight feet high, 50 feet wide and between 300 and 400 metres long —to criss-cross the 70-acre woodland and four-kilometre trail system.

Wayne McKay

Instead, the new plan calls for three berms that would be placed in specific areas of forest where they will have a minimal impact on the trails and the two brooks that run through it.

“I think we were all relieved,” McKay told the Cape Breton Post on Thursday. “I don’t think any of us expected it to go that way at all. A lot of people who were going into the meeting said to me that they weren’t very optimistic going in, and everybody was pretty optimistic coming out and expressed that it was a turning point, that things had changed. I’m personally kind of relieved because it’s been a lot of energy and time and focus. We’re back on a good track and there is communication happening and collaboration, and I think that’s all positive.”

The Post reached out to CBRM wastewater operations manager Matt Viva for comment on the new plan but did not receive a response by Thursday evening.

McKay said the municipality deserves credit for listening to the community and changing the plan.

“I think they do definitely deserve credit for that. I think it’s a really positive thing and all the credit to them because for a while there they weren’t in communication with us,” he said.

“Once the community spoke up and spoke up loudly they actually did listen and did allow for some opportunity to change what they were intending to do. I think that’s definitely a positive thing.”

McKay said the CBRM’s new approach to reducing flooding is a positive sign for the Wash Brook Greenway, a proposed pathway that would connect five kilometres of walkways in the Cossitt Heights subdivision on Sydney's outskirts, the Baille Ard Trail system, the Ashby neighbourhood near downtown and, eventually, the Sydney boardwalk.

Nick Hill, the wetland ecologist hired by Save the Baille Ard Forest to come up with alternative ways to control flooding in Sydney’s south end, noted in his report that much of the soil in the area is sandy loam, and not the so-called “clay bowl” it was often described as. That means landscaping features such rain gardens and bioswales near Brookland Elementary School and the Centennial Arena, as well as restored wetlands, could further prevent flooding by slowing down, collecting and filtering water that previously overwhelmed municipal storm sewers.

“It sounds like a real willingness to collaborate and look at the whole future of the Wash Brook and the watershed and what that’s going to look like, and also focusing on some of those green initiatives that will really improve the whole system,” said McKay.

“Our whole idea has always been around environmental stewardship and working with the watershed and recognizing that it’s a flood plain, so when we develop that greenway we were always cognizant of how we can do it in such a way that we’re enhancing the features naturally to help with flooding and help with environmental stewardship and education.”

Members of Save the Baille Ard Forest and the Baille Ard Recreation Association are scheduled to present to CBRM council at an upcoming meeting.

McKay said he has to meet with his organizing committee to discuss the matter, but he believes that the presentation will still take place, although the tone is likely to be quite different.

“In my mind we’re still going to go ahead but we might take a different approach to it — it might be less about advocating for them to change because they’ve made a significant proposal for a change to their plans. It may become more about focusing on some of those other possibilities and how we move forward collaboratively to make sure that we develop the watershed in a way that really works for the community and with the community, and with the Wash Brook as well, to make it work as best as possible so that it minimizes flooding but also becomes a treasure in the city for outdoor education and environmental conservation.”

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