The following letter was sent to Delta Mayor and council and copied to Delta Optimist.
As a longtime resident of Delta, 15 years in Tsawwassen and the last eight in North Delta, I feel I must very strongly argue against the proposed building of a cold storage facility on agricultural land at the edge of Burns Bog.
While the facility, if needed, isn’t itself a bad idea, the location is just wrong.
Delta has industrial areas with space that has not yet been built on, already zoned for this type of use. The access routes to the proposed facility are not set up for either the size or volume of commercial vehicles that will be accessing this facility daily. The increased noise pollution generated by these commercial vehicles will easily travel to the nearby long-established, residential areas.
While these are concerning enough to me as a resident of Sunshine Hills, located across Highway 91 from the proposed facility, it is the environmentally, tone deaf decision in this time of rapidly expanding climate issues to approve this construction in such close proximity to the fragile Burns Bog. Many are not aware or appreciate the benefits to our local and global air quality the world’s bogs affect. Until recently, the value of bogs have been largely ignored by researchers and policy makers, but that has changed. Historically, bogs were viewed as wastelands especially when located within urban areas as they are not normally built upon. However, bogs are superheroes of ecosystems: purifying water, mitigating flooding, providing homes for rare species.
Do we really want to have to answer, once again, to these future generations for our short-sightedness and lack of action regarding protecting ecosystems? I for one do not.
Please consider carefully your decision. You have been elected to represent the interests of your constituents as citizens; those of today, and of the future.
B. Richardson
