No Quarry in Bayside

March 18. 2009

Good evening everyone. I am Tim Foulkes from Bayside, a retired Marine Research Technologist who has owned property, raised a family, and lived in St Andrews and Bayside since 1964. In 2007 I became the chair of the Bayside Preservation Committee to co-ordinate and act on the concerns of local groups.  I'll begin with some definitions if I may:

One of the things that make us human is that we know we are going to die.

We are blessed with a capability for awareness of self and our environment.

Intelligence is, in part, the ability to reason, to plan, to learn from experience.

Ethics is a responsibility for intelligent humans to decide between right and wrong.

Those who wrote the Basic Planning Statement for our Bayside Local Service District must be commended for showing all these qualities when they drafted this plan for the future of Bayside.

The Objectives of the draft Rural Plan, that we discuss here, faithfully reproduce this vision, and I commend the planning commission for their work thus far.

However, I have a few bones to pick with regard to some of the policies and other regulations they have introduced, and I ask them to respect the experience and wisdom, the intelligence if you like, of those who have lived here a long time as well as those who have moved to this area because of the "rural character" and the "aesthetic beauty". These qualities are referred to in the Objectives and elsewhere in the plan and are of utmost concern. Most of us who have lived in big industrial cities cherish these qualities, and we know first hand what we stand to lose here.

I ask that the planning commission keep this foremost in their minds when setting policies, zoning, and other regulations in this plan. We are a rural community, and we want it to stay that way. For example, there should be no policy to consider a pit or quarry operation anywhere in the designated area of this regulation, by any means.  The Bayside Preservation Committee circulated a petition in 2007 and this opinion has been endorsed by over 700 local people.

If this hearing was not supposed to be about just the "flip" from a Planning Statement to a Rural Plan, I would suggest introducing a new policy that said, bluntly, "to discourage any application for a pit or quarry operation within the designated area".

I would also suggest a new policy, "to protect aesthetic beauty and the water quality of the St Croix River, its tributaries and its watershed that are part of the Bayside Planning Area".

My comments are detailed in a 6 page review of this draft plan that I emailed to Minister Haché, Kim Hughes and Steven McAlinden on March 13. I sincerely hope you will give them your fullest consideration, and I would also like to endorse the comments submitted by the Bayside LSD.

The future of the St Andrews peninsula lies not in ruinous heavy industry, but in those sustainable industries for which it is world famous, namely eco-tourism, science, and technology.

As E. F. Schumacher said in 1973, "Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, and the beautiful". Let the Bayside area and the St. Andrews peninsula continue to set an example to the world and reject the greed and madness that is ruining it. We can continue to set a good example here if we accept our human responsibilities to act with intelligence and do the right thing.

Tim Foulkes, Chair, Bayside Preservation Committee.   <tjdaff@nbnet.nb.ca>

Ref:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence