Interesting read in the Calgary Herald this week about the latest ploy to derail the critical public safety infrastructure project known as the Springbank Off-stream Reservoir.  The Springbank project has garnered much attention in the media since it was first announced over three years ago – largely because it will require the purchase of private land in order to build a cost-effective, safe and hugely important piece of flood mitigation to finally protect the City of Calgary from flooding on the Elbow River.

Remember 2013?

That was bad.  But it wasn’t the worst our fair City has seen – much larger floods have devastated Calgary in the past, and more will do so in the future if critical projects – like the Springbank project – are not completed along the Elbow and Bow Rivers. 

Expropriating private land to build public works to benefit the larger community is never an easy thing and rarely without controversy – but it happens.  All. The. Time.  Without it, we wouldn’t have the LRT routes we enjoy through Calgary today.  We wouldn’t have the roadways and interchanges that keep traffic flowing in our ever-growing City.  You get the picture.

What’s surprising though is the twist this particular controversy took this week.  The small group of impacted landowners opposed to the Springbank project have long taken the position that the project will “destroy their community” and will take away their heritage ranchland.  Destroying the community of Springbank is a stretch once you understand the facts (see below if facts matter to you), but there is no doubt, some ranchland is impacted.  However, it’s hard to reconcile the very vocal position over the last several years of a core group of Springbank landowners, with the announcement this week that several of these landowners have entered into a joint development venture with a tract housing developer to build a “master-plan community” on almost 1700 hectares of land right in the middle of where the dry dam will be built – tentatively to be called Copithorne Ranch. 

Wait – what?

How does “paving paradise” to build a suburb, complete with streets, sewer systems, infrastructure for utilities and all the disruption that comes along with plopping a massive residential community in the middle of heritage ranchland not “destroy the community” andtake away use of this land for ranching?

Some may see this as a ploy to kill the Springbank project – by artificially inflating the cost of the land to be purchased.  Licia Corbella who wrote the article seems to see it that way – based on her headline – “Springbank dry dam opponents trying new strategies to block project”.

So what is this really?

Are these opponents to the project so dead set against their land being used to provide critically needed flood mitigation to protect the economic engine of Western Canada that lies just a few kilometres down the road, that they are willing to pave it over and build a new suburb? Or does it show their true colours – which perhaps all along have been to extract a price for their land that doesn’t reflect the true, current market value (Note: original cost/benefit studies generously pegged land value at $10,000/acre)? Keep in mind this land has long been used as pasture land and currently has no zoning in place that would permit the so-called “Copithorne Ranch” master-plan community.

Hard to say.  But the hypocrisy is hard to miss. As is the bias in this article – which fails to point out the many logical inconsistencies in this latest strategy to block the project.  Maintaining the multi-generational integrity of ranchland apparently can be compromised, if the price is right.

And the position taken by the Tsuut’ina Nation this year has been equally hard to follow.  Years after the Springbank project was first announced, the Tsuut’ina surprisingly voiced opposition – raising an, as yet, unsubstantiated concern about impacts to their ground water on land nearly half a kilometre upstream from the project on their reserve lands – which, by the way, will be protected by local mitigation long before the Springbank project is ever operational.  Then – in an interesting twist – the Tsuut’ina suggested building an off-stream storage site directly on their reserve land instead of at the Springbank location.  All we can say is that we’ll find it quite confounding if the Tsuut’ina are not even more concerned about the potential impact to their traditional land use by the proposed “Copithorne Ranch”, than they are about the Springbank project.   A sub-division of tract housing will fundamentally and irrevocably change the land’s use, whereas, ironically, the Springbank project preserves it from future development forever more.

Time for action