The Pete Luckett effect

Want to get close to Pete?  Here’s your chance for only $1000.00/acre.

Grand Pre Road, Kings County. This beautiful large lot has lots of road frontage and is very close to Pete Lucketts brand new vineyard.  Minutes to Wolfville and Acadia University.  Approximately 5 kms to exit 9 on Hwy 101(Avonport).  Has been migrated to land registration system and is ready to go.

We have just one question. Well, two actually. Is it farmland and will the No Farms No Food group give a GD?

 

June 17, 2011

IRONY

Paul Withers for CBC TV does a story this evening on the financial stresses on NS towns with Wolfville as an example, streets that need paving, work NOT being done, including an interview with Keith Irving going on about the infrastructure deficit and then the visuals switch to show where work IS being done  –  The mayor’s Clock Park, where no expense is spared. Did CBC notice the contradiction?

We’ll add a link  to the segment if we find one. For now this will have to do.

UPDATE: Here is the link to the CBC news at 6  for June 17th segment: The Wolfville clip is at about 7:50 onward.

Mud Creek News III

Here is the last in the series of articles from the latest issue of the Mud Creek News. We are sorry to see Mr. Becker leave MCN. We hope publication continues.

This article is again by David Daniels. It is short but we thought it deserved separate attention.

Clock Park Costs

David A. Daniels

Angela Morin, the landscape architect who is working on the plans for the Clock Park, reported to Community Development Committee on January 20th that revisions to the plans have the lowered the costs to $150,000.00.  That is still $25,000.00 more than what’s in the Town’s reserve fund for this project.

It was not made clear whether Ms. Morin’s fees have already been paid out of the reserve fund.  Why wasn’t Ms. Morin asked to produce a plan that matched the money the Town had set aside in the reserve fund, $125,000.00?  One of the members of the CDC suggested that the plan be reworked so that it could be implemented in discrete stages over an extended period of time.

[Question; There was some money raised from the public for this park a few years back. Whatever happened to that money? Is that money in the reserve fund? Ww]

Park poetry

The following, written by Brian Sanderson, is so thoughtful and poetic we felt it needed to be shared. We hope he won’t mind our adding images.

Clock Park

by Brian Sanderson

It’s good to sprawl in the snow and listen.

Listen to the wind blowing through the trees.

It whistles through deciduous wood and whooshes in the tops of firs.

The brook tumbles steeply over stones.

I am captive to the melody and splendor of natures raw designs, comforting and familiar yet infinite in their variation.

Nature has laws that cannot be broken and yet they make so much possible.

The University woods are a fine place to be. Never mind the mud and the dog shit, it’s frozen.

No, it’s bullshit that bothers me. Expensive bullshit.

Clock Park. Too many thousands have been wasted on your ugly plasticized design.

It’s a place “designed by the people who will use it”, they say. Who will use it? Will they pay the $200,000 for construction?

Why spend such a fortune to so poorly imitate what nature makes for free?

Clock Park, I have no stomach for you.

Your Euclidian geometry reeks of petty control and bylaw.

You look too much like your creator.

A nfnf letter

We like to read letters to the editor from Wolfvillians. It gives us an idea what our fellow residents think since we don’t often get to hear their views expressed at town hall meetings. The latest letter which caught our attention was in The Register a few days ago with the header “County’s got a deal for you“. [There is a copy posted at Nofarmsnofoods]

The writer comments on Kings County’s “special treatment plan” for people who have agricultural land which they wish rezoned “but can’t because of some pesky old by-law“.

We do not know whether the 7 points laid out in the letter are accurate. They may be as we are aware that Councils will often give favoured interest groups special treatment, will do what they want to do, are deaf to constituents who disagree and often use taxpayers money for expensive consultants to conveniently back them up. We are absolutely on side with Ms. Haig-Stewart if there has been an abuse of due process. As a resident of Wolfville concerned with “fair and ethical” governance we  expect to see her speak up when she sees it happen here.

The writer appears to be against the transformation of farmland into other uses. What is of interest to us is that we have not seen an equivalent concern about “developments” in Wolfville. Did she write a letter when the Woodman lands orchards were rezoned? Was she vocal about Railtown which was built on dykeland?  Since she shows concern for this issue in areas outside of Wolfville was she helping put up signs to stop the transformation of farmland in New Minas into mega stores like Future Shop, Home Depot et al and their parking lots? Perhaps she is new to the area. Or we missed seeing her complaints. Or perhaps she favours developments in New Minas and Wolfville, just not in Greenwich and Port Williams.

We take issue with one of her statements.

WARNING – You will repeatedly have to listen to the arguments of the overwhelming majority of your fellow citizens who oppose the Special Treatment Plan and believe instead, in fair and ethical government and the need to save our agricultural resources for future generations. [emph ours]

Overwhelming majority of your fellow citizens? Could we please have some evidence for that notion? Was there a survey? No one asked us. [And if there was a survey answering it would have to be mandatory with a penalty to be valid as we have been told over and over again concerning the long form census.] Is she just counting signs for and against? This is not evidence. Anyway, at least as many properties don’t have signs of either type as have them.  And the statement is not very specific. Which citizens does she refer to? Citizens of Canada? Not likely. Are these citizens of the whole Province who are “overwhelmingsly against” Kings Council on this issue, or just citizens in the Valley, or just citizens in Kings Co., or just citizens of Wolfville? Or perhaps they are just citizens in the writer’s social circle.

This is a complex issue. A balance needs to be struck and the people best qualified to decide are those who live and work in the area concerned. The NFNF campaign has become a cause celebre. There always seems to be one to keep the activists active.

Clock Park meeting

The clock park input meeting is tonight.

Please join Angela and Town Staff at an Open House on Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at 7:00pm at the Fire Hall where this conceptual plan will be presented. Public comments and suggestions are encouraged!

This may be your last chance to say anything concerning this proposed significant expenditure.

Farm fight

We have read so much on one side of the Save our Farms issue that it was good to see another voice given SOME space in the Advertiser [Aug 17]. A sensible woman councillor [There are some around? Glory be!] wrote a letter to the editor as follows:

After numerous newspaper articles, several supportive editorials, newspaper advertising, hundreds of lawn signs, three lawn sign campaigns in Port Williams and a website, the No Farms No Food group has managed to get 900 people out of a Kings County population of 60,000 to sign the online petition, i.e. less than two per cent of the population.

That is not very good.

They have damaged the cause of the protection of the agricultural industry by dividing the community pitting neighbour against neighbour and farmer against farmer.

They have done this by distorting information. For example, in Port Williams, it is proposed to include into the growth centre 124 acres of Dykeview Farms and Riverbrook Farm. That is offset by the removal of 71 residential acres from the growth centre.

That equals 53 acres added to the growth centre plan. Since the village of Port Williams is 5,774 acres, this equals one per cent of new land available for development.

Why do they constantly refer to 167 acres? They do not subtract the 71 acres and they include back yards and private properties of other residents who are not developers, and also several squaring off lines to make a rational line on a map, recommended by planning staff.

Out of the 124 acres proposed for development, an open space donation must be made. This will take the Zone A of the well- fields out of both agriculture and residential. The 124 acres already are serviced with sewer and water. The school, post office, library all have the capacity to service growth.

The Kings County MPS directs growth to growth centres. Port Williams is a highly successful growth centre and fully-serviced village. Most of us who live there will welcome new neighbours, as we have welcomed residents of Solar Heights, Planters’ Square and Ports Landing subdivisions over the past 30 years. A new fully-designed subdivision will help us to recover from the double blows of losing our industrial base in the Shurgain mill and the egg grading station.

The Village of Port Williams was incorporated 49 years ago. It has legal status under the Municipal Government Act. The village has always been governed by visionary commissioners from many backgrounds. The commission is elected and is fully supported by the ratepayers of Port Williams and the commission supports the amendments awaiting approval in Halifax.

Respectfully submitted, Janet Newton, Councillor District 2, Municipality of the County of Kings

No online link found,  so this was taken from our fish wrapper copy. Emphasis is ours.

The SOS signs have been sprouting all over like dandelions in Wolfville, some of them on the town easement. It appears the No Farms No Food group has been going around asking householders to put signs on their properties, willy nilly. We doubt the campaigners are filling residents in on both sides of the issue so most of these signs probably do not represent informed or strong opinion.

We also note that when the Woodman Lands (that once were orchards) were going under the hammer of development we didn’t hear a peep.

The Wind in the Park

We can’t do better than publishing in full this submission from Brian Sanderson on Wind and the Clock Park, complete with his links. It is cross posted from his pages. We also point out opinions on the Park design in the comments.

I see that wind turbines are featuring again in the Business Section of the Chronicle Herald. Apparently Seaforth, located in Dartmouth, will build you a turbine for $250,000. They say that the turbine can produce 125,000 kilowatt hours annually. So is this a great deal or what?

Well, first note that they say can produce — not will produce. Obviously, can only becomes will when the wind blows fair and steady. There is no need to quibble over such minutiae if you live in Wolfville because we all know that we live in the best of all possible places on the best of all possible worlds. And we have the property taxes to prove it!

So what the heck does it mean to say 125,000 kilowatt hours annually? Well, it means two things:

1. First, a kilowatt hour is one of those weird units for energy. Converting to SI units, these turbines can produce 450,000 MJ of energy in one year. MJ just means a million Joules — which is probably about as meaningful as the name of my cat. Hold tight and come along for the ride. All will be revealed.Let us put 450,000 MJ in units of gasoline equivalents. One litre of gasoline has about 33 MJ of energy. So 13,600 litres of gasoline has about 450,000 MJ. At $1 per litre, that turbine saves us from blowing $13,600 each year on gasoline.OK, a petrol engine might only be 25% efficient so perhaps we’d need 54,500 litres of gasoline to produce 450,000 MJ of electric energy. On the other hand, the wind might not be so steady, so the turbine will only produce a fraction of the energy that it can produce. Still, we live in a perfect town where wind turbines are idealized and petrol engines are reviled.
2. Hang on a minute mate. There is another way of thinking about 125,000 kilowatt hours annually. This is like running a 15 kW (kilo-Watt) generator continuously for a year. Now we can buy a 15 kW gasoline generator for less that $3000. Heck, that’s a lot less expensive than a $250,000 wind turbine. Let’s not forget that installing that wind turbine is probably also going to be a rather expensive business and heaven forbid that it ever needs fixing! Blow me down, I figure I could put $250,000 into a secure investment and use the interest to buy a new gasoline generator each year and still have plenty of loot left over to take a trip down to Cancun in the winter. Still, we live in a perfect town where wind turbines are idealized and petrol engines are reviled.

Indeed, our town is so perfect that we don’t even have a petrol station. I’m told we used to have 5 of them way back in the old days, before we became perfectly politically correct. Of course, I wouldn’t know because I wasn’t round these parts back in those less enlightened times. Nevertheless, I know that there must have been at least 2 petrol stations. One of them remains, a derelict shell. Another has been gifted to The Town by a great oil man and general Maritime benefactor. Mr Irving pulled up his petrol station, planted a tree, installed a fancy clock, and gave us Clock Park.

Town Council has hired an expert to come up with an all frills design for Clock Park. These aren’t just any sort of frills, you know. Heck, they’re talking about $225,000 dolars worth of gardening. Add to that the cost of hiring the “designer” and you’re probably up to the cost of one of those wind turbines!

You know what I’m thinking, right! Yep, if we can have a clock in the park, why not a wind-turbine to boot. Think on it. Yes, a turbine is an elegant structure and would be the perfect symbolic replacement for the petrol stations of our demonic past.

Close your eyes and picture all the motorists pulling into “Clock Park” and plugging their Zenn Cars into the turbine. Now there we have it, a park and a transportation plan — all in one nice neat little package. Surely town luminaries will love it?

Of course, those grumps at Wolfville Watch are going to tell you that the wind doesn’t blow in Wolfville. Never mind, I say, “We have plenty of pumped up potentates to blow up a fair breeze.”

Grumps? Grumps???

RELATED:

The Nova Scotia Securities Commission today, Aug. 3, released its annual list of traps that cautious investors should avoid. …

4. Green Schemes: Investment opportunities tied to new energy-efficient “green” technologies are increasingly popular with investors and scammers alike. Scammers often exploits headlines to cash in on unsuspecting investors, from oil spill clean-ups to environmental innovations tied to “clean” energy, such as wind energy, wave energy, carbon credits and other alternative energy financing.

Hogwarts meets Hogweed

An unexpurgated submission from Brian Sanderson. It requires no comment. Just sit back with a cool one and enjoy.

Vegetative States

Elwin Hemphill writes, in the Chronicle Herald, about “Twenty-five-foot-tall Hogweeds with grotesque faces and legs and feet converging on Halifax from the Annapolis Valley.” OK, so far the story sounds sensible. But look at what comes next. Elwin expects us to believe that “the evil scientist from Acadia University” develops these malicious weeds whereas “a brilliant Dalhousie botanist… develops the herbicide to kill the Hogweeds”.

Come on Elwin! Everyone knows that the scientists from Acadia U. are the ones wearing white lab coats.

So, do you want to know the true story?

It was a dark and dreary day on the fog-bound peninsular of Halifax. The sewage system had broken down, again. Mayor Peter Jelly-legs was up to his neck in fermenting poop. The word went out, up the effluent-coated conduits of political power, “Please, save me Double-D Dextrous-man”. Premier Double-D dispatched a limousine full of snivel servants to pluck poor Peter from his polluted predicament. It took the whole afternoon for them to towel Peter off, after which they sent out for pizza and then stayed up late into the night working on overtime forms.

The next day Double-D Dextrous-man was fuming. Peter had landed the whole Province in a rightwinged pickling barrel, and here he was, a hopeless lefty without even a public servant to whine with — flush with cash from yesterdays escapade, they had all decided to throw a sickie.

So what does a Premier do when the chips are down? Well, he takes a S-L-O-W lunch at the most exclusive joint in town. The taxpayers can afford it, after all. More to the point, the journalist can’t afford it and old Double-D figured it would be prudent to steer clear of Journo’s on this particular day.

As luck would have it, Dr Strange-gene, from the Dalhousie Department of Dubious Science, was also having a S-L-O-W lunch. You see, Dr Strange-gene was celebrating his brand spanking new $26M Grant which had been awarded to him by the Government of Canada as part of their program to pay for flying pigs. Double-D and Dr Strange-gene may seem like an unlikely dynamic-duo but they were the only S-L-O-W patrons that day so they struck up a fateful conversation.

If Double-D had the problem then Dr Strange-gene had the solution.
“You see, what we do is this. We call it biosolids. Then, here’s the best bit, we say it makes great fertilizer and sell it to those bumpkins down The Valley!”
Double-D was a bit skeptical at first.
“Look, those folks down The Valley aren’t total fools. Remember, they elected me! Eventually, they’re sure to figure out that this biosolid stuff is really just dressed up sh_t.”
“No problems, my good Double-D Dextrous-man” Dr Strange-gene quickly reassured. “We will genetically alter the stuff. One sniff, and the user will be hooked. It’ll be the biggest thing since cocaine.”
Double-D was delighted! The very next day he sent Dr Strange-gene a truck load of cash and 10 public servants to help screw in the broken light bulb at Dr Strange-gene’s undergound laboratory. Then Double-D phoned up his favourite lefty columnist, Ralph Sure-fix, to do a few stories for the Comical Herald and ratchet up the marketing campaign.

Haligonians all enjoyed swimming in the harbour that summer. Why not, the sh_t had all been trucked to The Valley. Farmers down The Valley were high as kites — and profits doubled, too. Most townsfolk at Wolfville were delighted because the Mayor had developed “green thumbs!” Of course there was always that troublesome bunch of malcontents at Wolfville Watch. As always, they insisted that something “Just didn’t smell right…”

The harvest that year was bountiful. Farmers actually made a profit! Double-D celebrated by instituting a “wind fall” tax and made speeches about the glorious achievements of Dr Strange-gene and his cloned-cohort at the Dalhousie Department of Dubious Science. Oh what wonders the future would bring!

Meanwhile, back in The Valley, Mayor Instead looked at his thumbs and cried “Wolfville will have a Green Revolution”! Almost everyone was happy — except for those troublemakers at Wolfville Watch. Some Wolfville Watchers whispered concerns that there might be something ominous going on. There were rumours that thumbs weren’t the only thing green about the Mayor of Wolfville. Indeed, Mayor Instead was exhibiting an hysterical aversion to herbicides. Strangely, this aversion was shared by most other politicians and legislation was passed to ban all pesticides from the fair Province of Nova Scotia.

Mutterings at Wolfville Watch were being totally ignored until, one day, in early spring, a Councilor went down to Clock Park and planted himself… Many of the Townsfolk thought this was not only a very good idea but also “quite normal”. A couple of the Professors at Acadia U. Department of Biology found the whole thing a bit odd, even interesting. They took a few samples from the Councilor Tree and ran genetic tests. It seemed that the Councilor Tree had a preponderance of plant DNA. How could that be? They collected more DNA samples and ran tests late into the night (without overtime). Low and behold they discovered which strands of DNA cause otherwise normal people to manifest as politicians. What’s more, it seems that DNA was very like a mutation found when plants were fed biosolids.

There was general rejoicing as more and more politicians took to planting themselves in Clock Park. Truly, this was the greenest solution to carbon emissions! Citizens of Nova Scotia are well-accustomed to vegetative politicians. So, for a few short weeks, The Valley was idyllic.

Then joy turned to panic. It seems that this trans-genic stuff could go both ways. Twenty-five-foot-tall Hogweeds had acquired the political gene and were converging on Town Halls and Province House! As though Doubly-Dextrous and Instead-man weren’t enough, now they were being joined by some serious vegetables…

The people were beside themselves, something had to be done. But what? An old-timer crop-duster suggested “herbicides”. He was immediately set-upon by a swarm of bureaucrats and frog-marched to jail for violating Town bylaws.

Now, I know that you all want to have that happy ending. You know, the ending where one of our finest returns from the Alberta Tar Sands with a litre of Roundup to rid us of Hogweeds and politicians for ever and ever. I’m sorry, it isn’t going to happen. You see, our politicians were photosynthesizing so contentedly that they clean forgot to ask Ottawa for our annual Transfer Payment! Without that reminder, the rest of the Canada clean forgot that we even existed…

The farm fight

The pitchforks are out.  It is a pretty uneven battle. On one side are those of influence who want to preserve the bucolic landscape we love (some of us after making our livelihoods and fortunes elsewhere – probably somewhere urban).

On the other side are the  farmers (at least some of them) who can’t seem to do well and think they have property rights. Poor sods. They should know we Canadians don’t really have property rights. They aren’t enshrined in the infamous Charter and if farmers want to sell their land for a purpose other than farming, it’s just too bad. Because  the land is zoned agricultural and that is that. Zoning is sacrosanct. When it suits us that is. Or until government confiscates the land for something in the “common good”, say an airport or a Walmart or a wind farm.

In Wolfville agricultural land has been bought and sold for all kinds of purposes for generations. Half the properties around here were once farmlands or orchards. It wasn’t that long ago that the Woodman Grove development was approved.  Wasn’t there an orchard there? But that is different, of course. We know better now.

Families who cashed in early were winners and we who followed have a right to benefit from any increase in value due to the new use. That is as it should be. Those families who maintained a farm for a hundred years or more instead of selling out when they could, when we were less enlightened, too bad for them.

So farmers, don’t rain on our parade. We like having you around.  Your farms are quaint and a source of fresh veggies in season. We like to have you right next door so we can look out on green fields and fruit trees. Except when you smell and create noise and spray things; we retain the right to complain loudly about that and stop it if we can.

Never mind that we vote for people and policies that don’t actually support your business. Farms and farmers have to be over taxed like any other business and closely regulated. Get serviced by municipal water and sewage  systems? No way. Pay for your own. And no Bio solids or pesticides or hormones or GM foods. You farmers have to watch your waste and fertilization practices to save our water. Costly yes, but we have a right to safe, fresh, cheap food and clean water. Not profitable? Oh, that’s too bad. So sorry. We’ll write a letter to the paper when your hog farm goes bust.

You say we are having our cake and eating it too? Why not? It’s at your expense not ours. Admit that our position is self -serving? Don’t think so. Hypocritical because we love to shop at Super store and Future shop? No way, we are saving the planet and our children’s patrimony.