Rotten on Bowen: cidergate series POST 9

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9

Get ready for bylaws, bad government, plenty of acronyms, and more. This post will gallop through a series of things established in earlier cidergate posts, and start to connect them to topics and themes that will open up further in subsequent posts – take a deep breath!

So – we’ve established a few things so far:

• cider making is a light industrial process, not an agricultural one
• cider production is a fermentation industry, a sub-type of winemaking
• this industry produces particularly challenging wastewater impacts, which lead to increased industry specific care and costs
• the wastewater is bio-active – as we’ll see in later posts, the high levels measured as biological oxygen demand (BOD), and suspended solids (TDS, TSS), are known and recognised hazards

And specific to Bowen Island:

• the municipality was aware before issuing a Temporary Use Permit (TUP) for Riley’s Cidery that alcohol production was a light industrial process, with significant wastewater challenges
• the Official Community Plan (OCP) has specific mandates for light industrial land use: for example,

(note – I’ve cited the latter policy as number 202 in some instances; a newly consolidated OCP from 2023 renumbers this as policy 205, but the publicly available OCP prior to that date recorded it as 202)

• OCP policy 205 places an active duty (“will prove“) for light industry to not just assert, but prove, adequate water supply and waste disposal capability
• the Land Use Bylaw consistently requires industrial processes (where light industry is the only permitted category of industry on Bowen Island) to be sited 50m back from watercourses; see for example section 4.9 of the LUB on industrial zones, which then specifies in subsection 4.9.2 (highlight added):

• in assessing, preparing and presenting a TUP application for Riley’s Cidery, Daniel Martin was responsible for assessing this application against the OCP and associated Land Use Bylaw provisions, and against the specific requirements for a TUP that:

• the TUP application also required a site map that specifically marks and identifies (highlight added):

• at the time of the TUP, vineyards (technically and functionally the same thing as a cider production orchard) were expressly prohibited – exceptionally so – in the OCP as an agricultural land use

BUT…

not one of these things was considered or included in the issuing of a TUP for Riley’s Cidery. Consider:

• the TUP site map does not show Murray Creek or consider the DPA
• seven of ten neighbours were opposed to the cidery and felt it was counter to the character of the neighbourhood
• that this was a light industrial land use was never disclosed, discussed or considered – even though it was raised (by us, in our submission to Council) as a concern specifically related to “adequate water supply and waste disposal capability“
• to this day, Rob Purdy, Christine Hardie, BIM staff and Council, in issuing this TUP, renewing it (on December 12, 2023) and discussing its environmental impact have never addressed the light industrial nature of the cidery’s waste nor provided the proof required by policy 205
• first introducing it to Council for consideration December 2020, within months of the issuing of the TUP, Daniel Martin shepherded through a housekeeping bylaw that removed the vineyard prohibition form the OCP (Bylaw No. 528, 2020)

That is a snapshot of just some of the issues established so far.

TUPs on Bowen Island: a corrupted process

In my previous post, I described the circumstances in which Councillors met with Ross Beaty and/or Rob Purdy and Christine Hardie prior to issuing the TUP.

This particular TUP is problematic for those reasons, and also for the outline presented above of Daniel Martin’s handling of this TUP. As previously described (in 5: Riley’s Cidery and BIM: swimming with sharks?) the construction, directed largely by Councillor David Hocking, of a rationale for passing this TUP on a faux-consideration of neighbour’s concerns, is equally problematic.

However, the history and use of TUPs prior to and after this particular TUP indicate much greater areas of concern – concerns that can be fairly described under the label corrupt. I’ll explore those in a future post, but just one example will start to illustrate this.

A previous TUP, Temporary Use Permit TUP-01-2019, permitted an eight hour event (a car show) once a year, for a three year period (the event had previously been authorised as a temporary use in two separate years). It was issued on July 8, 2019 by the same Council who considered the Riley’s Cidery TUP :

In the staff report advising passage of this TUP, this background is provided:

BACKGROUND

The applicant has held an annual one-day exhibition event on his rural residential property the past two years. Assembly use was permitted through a 1-year Temporary Use Permit that was renewed once. The TUP was approved with environmental protection measures, restrictions on hours of operation and a maximum of one event per year. The Municipality did not receive any complaints regarding the event and staff have not observed any issues from the temporary use.

The property is within a watershed and riparian area.

The introduction to the staff report and recommendations by then BIM planner Emily Chow (a staff planner junior to Daniel Martin):

PROPOSED TEMPORARY USE
The application is for a one-day exhibition event scheduled for Saturday, July 21, 2019. The event
was held last year on Saturday, July 21st. The same siting and similar traffic volumes are expected
this year. The applicant is seeking a permit period of three years.

PROPOSED CONDITIONS
Due to the proximity to a tributary of a fish-bearing stream, staff recommend conditions as outlined
by an environmental professional be included in the Temporary Use Permit to protect the watershed
and riparian area.

So. An eight hour event requires an environmental impact assessment, and conditions specifically to protect the watershed and riparian area – Development Permit Area (DPA) categories.

But – three year’s continuous operation for a light industrial cidery? Watershed and riparian areas, the DPA, not even mentioned. Not mapped or recorded.

pull up a chair on the patio, picnics, parties, banjos and guitars:

A sub-note – we also raised with Daniel Martin the question of assembly use – another land use severely restricted in the LUB – something (again) completely unconsidered and ignored by him; assembly use is defined in the LUB as

“ASSEMBLY” means the use of land or a building or structure for gatherings for public, charitable, cultural, religious, memorial, philanthropic, recreational, educational or entertainment purposes.

And a cidery and orchard open to the public, widely advertised and promoted as such, inviting gatherings of persons, advertised not just locally, but regionally, nationally, and internationally, well, that’s pretty definitively assembly use.

Not only the 2019 TUP (for, again, a once yearly eight hour event), but the most immediate TUP preceding Riley’s Cidery also focussed attention on the question of assembly use, as problematic and a concern for neighbours.

For Riley’s Cidery? Just like everything else, not an issue to be considered.

bylaws and DPAs – another corrupted process?

Before the issuing of the TUP, my mother wrote to Bonny Brokenshire, as then BIM Manager of both Bylaws, and Environment and Parks Planning, asking if there had been a hydrological (environmental) impact assessment for the cidery proposal. Bonny replied:

In early April, after the TUP had been issued, we reached out again to bylaw services; there was constant work on the cidery site, with large equipment, and the disturbance of earth in an area right above Murray Creek.

This had been going on well before the TUP was issued – we had communicated directly to Rob and Christine on March 10, 2021, about this:

yesterday and today, we can hear, and see, the installation of equipment for an enterprise that you don’t yet have any permit for, and where you have yet to actually hear or address the needs of those who built and inhabit the neighbourhood

Just note, this was two weeks before Council was even to meet to potentially issue a TUP – clearly, Rob and Christine felt entirely confident they would get that permission.

There is more in that email exchange to discuss, which I’ll bracket for a future discussion.

Rob had always been clear that he intended to use the wastewater for irrigation, and we were increasingly concerned that this wastewater was being essentially injected into the land. On March 13, in response to our questions he wrote:

We are working with VCH and a qualified wastewater engineer to implement a gray water system where any water that is needed in the cidery can then be used for irrigation on our cider orchard – to avoid water waste. 

An irrigation system was being installed – ie there were works going into the ground to spread this water into the soil. And to be absolutely clear – this isn’t “gray water” – it is high BOD, polluted, risky, industrial wastewater.

In a very reductive definition, greywater includes any wastewater not from a toilet – but it is generally conceived, and managed, as the wastewater from domestic sinks, washing machines, dishwashers, which can be used for irrigation, within 24 hours (it starts to degrade and smell) and shouldn’t be used where it can merge into stormwater runoff.

We asked for bylaw to assess the construction of irrigation, about the activities of heavy machinery and visible earthwork on the site above Murray Creek, and also to clarify how and if the DPA areas were identified and shared.

On April 9, Tyler Ruggles, then BIM Bylaw officer wrote to us:

Both Bylaw Service Officers attended 620 Laura Road yesterday in response to concerns that there may be work being performed in a Development Permit (DP) area.
Both Doug Woods and I were shown around the property and all of our questions were answered by the property owner Rob Purdy. We took our GPS device with map to show where the DP areas are located on the property and explained the importance to ensure DP is obtained before turning any soil. Bylaw Services referred the property owner to BowMap to be able to turn on the layer showing where DP areas are located.
Bylaw Services is confident that no contraventions are occurring at 620 Laura Road and that the property owner will first reach out to the Municipality should any plans be made to work within identified environmentally sensitive areas.

The work – and “turning of soil” – continued, and when we phoned bylaw for clarification, it then became clear that they had not in fact checked the area above the creek – the area we had specifically identified as a concern. They didn’t even understand that Murray Creek transected the property or that we had asked them to look at and consider bylaw issues, including the use of wastewater for irrigation, relative to the creek – we had to explain where it was. They hadn’t (having been “shown around the property“) looked at anything relative to the creek.

It was then a further month before Tyler Ruggles attended the cidery site again (that is, in early May 2021). So – when he wrote to us April 9 about being confident that there were no contraventions and that they’d been shown around the property – clearly not really (meaningfully) true.

At that time, (ie a month later, in May) he told us that there was no earth disturbance, just the moving of “brush” but that he had previously identified a small area of gravel in the DPA close by the cidery building which he’d speak to the owner about – there should have been a DP request for that work.

This just wasn’t true – we then sent a photograph to bylaw services (including Bonny as Manager) showing the soil disturbance and machinery in use in early May -ie the property owner had not “reached out” to the Municipality for new work clearly in a DPA:

And we had also communicated with Daniel Martin, Bonny Brokenshire and CAO Liam Edwards by this time (early May, 2021) around the issues of light industrial waste, the requirements of the OCP and LUB, and the siting of any industrial uses setback 50m from a watercourse.

Remember Bonny, March 15, 2021? “if works encroach into the development permit area…impact assessments would be required” – well, that wasn’t true. Tyler Ruggles’ confidence on April 9 – well, that was misplaced.

and so they did – what? Nothing – well, nothing useful.

Tyler Ruggles was suddenly, within a couple of days, no longer employed at the Municipality, and had left Bowen Island.

And, as I discovered the following year, when I finally received the freedom of information records I’d requested from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), Liam had emailed VCH Drinking Water Officer Ross Adamson. We had also written to Ross with a series of questions, a letter copied to Liam. Liam attached that letter (not the letter we had written to him, Daniel Martin and Bonny, which covered the bylaw and light industry issues) to Ross with the following:

Sent: Monday, May 10, 2021 10:29 AM, To: Adamson, Ross [VCH] cc: Daniel Martin; Bonny Brokenshire

Subject: RE: Bowen Island – cidery

Hello Ross,

Mv name is Liam Edwards. I’m the Chief Administrative Officer of Bowen Island Municipality and [redacted under section 13, FOIPPA].

Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you would like to discuss this further.

Kind regards,

Liam

Liam’s email with the document he attached can be read here.

The response from Ross Adamson:

Sent: Monday, May 10, 2021 11:58 AM, To: ‘Liam Edwards’ cc: Daniel Martin; Bonny Brokenshire; Tam, Gary [VCH] >; Ritson, Mark [VCH]

Subject: RE: Bowen Island – cidery

Hi Liam,

I appreciate you reaching out. I do not have any specific concerns to discuss at this time since the applicant at the cidery is actively working towards achieving VCH approval. Most of the information the complainant is requesting is not considered public information so it will not be shared with them, but they are free to file a freedom of information request.

Thank you,

Ross

Liam also emailed me, the evening after that exchange with Ross Adamson – Monday, May 10, 2021 at 6:46 p.m.. I can’t read Liam’s mind, but it appears to me that he felt emboldened and covered by Ross’s reply to – uh – respond aggressively to me?

Rather than reply to the joint business account my mother and I were using for dealing with all of this, and from which our bylaw and other concerns had been sent, Liam sent an email to my personal account (details of which he had from the past), reading:

I am glad you make reference to reaching out to me directly and I look forward to that discussion.  There is much to discuss, including your own actions, accusations and general disregard for the very principles you profess to uphold and seek from others.  Please let me know what days and times you are available for a discussion, your preferred method (Zoom, Teams, phone, safely distanced in person, other) and I will see about making myself available.

Regards, Liam

Nice.

I replied to him, which I won’t cite in full as I discuss with him my personal medical situation. I was by that time (early May 2021) suffering significantly from depression, under treatment for it, and increasingly despairing. I had previously written to him, at the beginning of April, from the personal account he was now sending emails to:

Liam;

Given some further events today I have to ask you not to contact me for the time being; the toxicity and damage that the Municipality as a whole have brought into my life and that of my family is so severe, and so unacknowledged, that it’s beyond anything I can be expected to bear, and I increasingly can’t bear it. 

You seem all to me to be floating in a fact-free, unaccountable fantasy land, with absolutely no care or conception of the harms you are responsible for. I don’t think you are all bad people, and part of what is tormenting for me is that I have sympathy for many of you. That includes you. But you are in a broken place, where facts don’t matter, harm to people and their lives doesn’t matter, so many uncrossable lines are crossed so often that no-one can see where the boundaries are anymore.

I can’t engage with people or an organization that is so destructive right now,

Yours,

Heather 

Some of what I wrote to him May 10 2021:

...I am writing you a rather unfair letter, as in I really don’t want you to reply to me. I can’t bear the (I’m sorry, this is rude) middle-management bureaucratese you will use. The skirting around things you don’t want to acknowledge, the circumscription. Cannot bear it.

I can’t bear it because it, and the reasons for it, cause me tremendous pain…

I am beyond hope. I don’t have hope that anyone will do the right thing, anywhere, ever.

Clearly, I was not, as they say, in a good place.

Re the water, we had, by then, written literally dozens of emails, polite, brief, emails, asking questions, asking for someone to pay attention to our questions and worries, made calls, again, polite, respectful – and received absolutely nothing, nothing at all, in return.

As this may suggest, Liam and I had a history of engagement – something I’ll cover further in my upcoming post bidding farewell to Liam as Bowen Island CAO.

I’ll freely admit that when we wrote to Ross Adamson (May 7, 2021) and to Daniel Martin, Liam Edwards, and Bonny Brokenshire (May 9, 2021) we were frustrated, fed up and increasingly angry about the lack of meaningful response from any of them. But – nothing I did or said justifies Liam’s personal nastiness, that my “actions” merit his calling me in like a badly behaved school child to discuss my general disregard for the very principles you profess to uphold and seek from others. Certainly, we suggested Daniel Martin’s conduct should be investigated – that it seems to me is an entirely reasonable (if not politically strategic to say out loud) conclusion to have come to. You can read Liam’s reply to me, which he attached to our letter, with that letter, here.

You can read our letter to Ross Adamson in the source I cited above, following as attached by Liam in his email to Ross. Again, frustrated, yes. Long, yes. This was after repeated requests (polite, short, but concerned) for detail on what VCH’s role was. Rude? I don’t think so. And among the questions we asked were process questions, like these:

Again, hard to see in what defensible reality Ross Adamson could claim that answers to those questions were things not to be disclosed to the public.

Gary Tam, Senior Environmental Health Officer, wrote to us on May 12 responding to our letter to Ross. It’s a confused response – see here the version my FOI request returned (where a “clean” version has recast the subject as a cidery at 1355 Westside Road – that’s our address, not the address of the cidery). The FOI records show Ross had sent him our email with no comment or anything, just forwarded it, May 7, and four days later Gary Tam wrote to another Senior Environmental Health Officer:

Guess any conversation they had is off the record. Gary Tam then emailed Ross Adamson literally a half-hour before writing to me, several times, with questions:

Hi Ross,
Would you let me know:

1. if Riley’s has submitted application for drinking water?
2. What is their current potable water source?
   Thanks.
   Sincerely,
   Gary Tam,

So are they going to expand the use of the existing well or construct another water system for the cidery?
Gary Tam

Another thing …. does Rob need to file us their septic system?
Gary Tam

In case you though perhaps Gary was new to the job, or had no involvement with the cidery, he was the VCH Environment Health Officer serving as president of their professional organisation (CIPHI) in 2011, and had been in contact with Rob and Christine since late April. Here’s a sample email from Rob Purdy to Gary Tam:

Briefly, VCH consistently claimed these two sentences from Ross Adamson (the March 30 “explanation” cited by Gary Tam) were a fully adequate response:

Hello Heather,
The cidery is working through the VCH approval process in respect to the water system, wastewater disposal, and operation of a food premises. Once the premises has opened, VCH’s role is to inspect the water system as well as the food premises.
Thanks,
Ross

I’ll leave fuller discussion of all of VCH’s involvement to a later date.

Again – just note – we were supposedly protected by an OCP that required proof that the exact things we were worried about could not happen. We were supposedly protected by provincial regulation and care about the safety of drinking water. But when we sought to get or see that proof, or details on just how or whether our drinking water was protected, or ensure proof was being sought, we received – well – at first nothing of any substance or meaning, and then, when we kept asking, abuse.

Development Permit Areas

In previous posts I made reference to the DPA covering the Riley’s Cidery site: see for instance cidergate post 2, 2: The rot sets in: Riley’s cidery and the Bowen Island Municipality where I’d written:

“Below is the BowMap diagramming of 620 Laura Road: slide right to see the basic lot properties, and slide left to see the DPA restrictions overlaid on the lot:

For reference, this particular map image was accessed when I wrote that original post (February 2024); the rest of the map images in this post, down below, were all accessed September 16-18 2024. There is no change in BowMap recording over this time, but I provide the dating just to establish referentiality.

Above, the Riley’s Cidery lot is shaded pink – the overlay shows in yellow the watershed protection area. The blue dotted lines are “tributaries to fish-bearing streams” with the bordering riparian leave area indicated with the blue transparency. The deeper blue shapes are ponds, and you can just start to see at the bottom left (darker yellow/lime shading) wetland areas.

Regulation of the DPAs I’m referring to was established in a bylaw passed in 2011 (consequent on the passing of the revised OCP of that same year) – Bowen Island Municipality Bylaw No. 301, 2011, which is specifically and only concerned with

“development within a Watershed, Aquifer, and Stream Protection Development Permit Area“

It’s often referred to by BIM staff by the acronym WASP; it’s also often used synonymously with DPA, as there aren’t really any other island wide development permit areas – despite the OCP. See BIM’s recent development permit brochure for more.

While that bylaw reflected OCP commitments, it was also required by other legislation, as recorded in the bylaw preamble:

The dotted blue lines in the map above indicate watercourses that are tributaries to fish-bearing streams – the focus of the Riparian Area Regulation and the Fish Protection Act.

Bylaw 301 established the mapping in use in BowMap. It was signed by then mayor Bob Turner, after a consultation and series of hearings informed in part by the professional advice of Alan Whitehead: from the minutes of the special Council meeting, September 19, 2011, which approved the final text of the bylaw, passed at the next Council meeting:

I mention all of this, as with the discussion above of Bonny Brokenshire’s involvement, to illustrate the concerns I raised in my post about the compromised nature of the Bowen Island Conservancy’s ongoing and agreed collaboration with BIM on “subdivision and rezoning applications”, where Bonny, Bob and Alan are all key members of the Conservancy.

As we will see, protecting watersheds is not just for the lolz, not just a meaningless exercise in bureaucratic pedantry. It matters a great deal.

Rob Purdy certainly appears to want to be publicly identified with this fact: he is now a senior executive (one of a small team of three senior execs) advising on investing for a boutique firm started up late 2021. The firm splashes on its front page their social impact credentials, steering investment in farms committed to principles and practices that … improve watersheds, among other goals.

so – how is he doing in the real world?

As Tyler Ruggles explicitly specified on April 9, 2021, Rob Purdy was shown the DP areas on the property and steered to refer to the BowMap mapping of those:

We took our GPS device with map to show where the DP areas are located on the property and explained the importance to ensure DP is obtained before turning any soil. Bylaw Services referred the property owner to BowMap to be able to turn on the layer showing where DP areas are located.

The images above, of the soil disturbance and machinery, are of work in the area indicated by the red oval on the map below:

In her initial reply to our bylaw concern in April 2021, Bonny included her instruction to bylaw service officers Tyler Ruggles and Doug Woods:

Small DP area? On the map above the DP area is conservatively 2/3 of the lot. And when they got back to us, despite stating no contraventions, clearly, there were contraventions.

But it’s worse than that…

The map above, with red dot, has the ortho and contour levels also turned on to begin to illustrate the issues the cidery site has with slopes and drainage – it is a very steep, sloping lot. Future posts will consider this in relation to both our home (and well) and to the watershed – the elevation fall illustration below is from those posts, showing a snapshot of the steep fall from the cidery to sea level:

The photos below, from May 2021. are taken from Westside Road, and clearly indicate the steepness of the cidery site, and the course of Murray Creek. The rocks at the bottom left corner of the first image are in the foreground of the second – these mark the culvert where Murray Creek leaves the cidery site, to go under the road and into the pond on the property below. The line – flow – of the creek is marked by the green tree line besides and paralleling the fence in the centre of the first image.

And what does this mean? One word – ravine.

ravine?

The WASP bylaw requires more than the 30m setback from the edge of a watercourse for a watercourse in a ravine. The crucial marker point becomes the top of the ravine bank:

I am going to suggest that, if nothing else, the history of the Riley’s Cidery TUP shows that trusting the guardianship of the common good, the preservation of public safety and wellbeing, to the judgment, discretion and professionalism of BIM staff, and most particularly Daniel Martin, alone is a very, very, very bad idea. I’m going to more than suggest, just say it. Very bad idea.

Just how bad, how dangerous, and expensive, we’ll see when I discuss further the issues of the watershed, aquifers, and related matters.

A further note – the OCP review suggested as likely in Daniel’s 2022 presentation is now underway – and he is the member of staff shepherding that process. Troubling, for all sorts of reasons.

meanwhile – the Murray Creek ravine…

I don’t have the specific measurements (and I’m not a surveyor) that would establish if the Murray Creek watercourse on the Riley’s Cidery site meets the definition of a ravine (a definition that is in any case not provided with technical detail in the bylaw) but just the topography of the land in question should have prompted attention to this. Remember OCP Policy 202 at the top of this post? Basing permissible light industrial use on “the environmental characteristics of the area“?

Remember also the increased setback for light industrial use; the images below sketches in a further 20m setback (in red) on the cidery site to show 50m instead of 30m:

I’ve layered this over the ortho image at right to point to the buildings on-site to indicate an issue not yet pointed to – the straight dotted lines angling to the left off Murray Creek are clearly routed straight to two buildings on site (the cidery and barn) and indicate man-made watercourses/channels that connect to and from Murray Creek: I believe these may be of long-standing, work done by the Rileys in the past (perhaps at the time they started using the surface water licence they obtained in 2000, when they also did other works, including retention ponds). However, the point is that these man-made channels are clearly identified as themselves tributaries to a fish-bearing stream.

if you do not mention when questioned something that you later rely on in Court

there’s more…and this is almost literally unbelievable…

If you isolate the BowMap layers to show the ortho layer (ie buildings and landscape) and activate the legal lot line, the cidery patio and pathways, plus an area of the new trees planted – appear to be on someone else’s land. The aqua line marks the lot boundaries – derived from the single, trusted, provincial mapping of legal boundaries used in assessment, property transactions, etc:

The ortho layer should be reliable – the whole point of ortho mapping is that this is an aerial image geometrically corrected to remove any distortions and follow the same accurate mathematical mapping parameters that characterises the lot boundary lines.

Obviously, this would have to be properly surveyed – we have the original subdivision plans for the neighbourhood with the formal recorded lot lines and dimensions (image below) which visually corresponds to the BowMap lot boundaries. My source note earlier re the map images I’m using identifies that these are downloads/screenshots from September 16-18, 2024 – this particular issue (the lot line building violation) is so egregious, and frankly weird, that I’ve checked and looked at the mapping multiple times, to make sure I wasn’t just getting some strange anomalous result, and I checked it again right before posting – always and still the map I show above.

BUT – regardless – Rob and Christine got a building permit and approval, ie building inspection, in August 2020 for this expanded building (it had been a storage shed before), the bylaw officers who attended and checked their GPS/BowMap settings in April 2021 -the gravel they said was problematic was the area around the patio, in back – plus Daniel Martin did a site inspection in late January 2021 to prepare the TUP, where he included the patio area as part of the plan – and no-one noticed this?

It seems almost anti-climactic to also point out that this is a light industrial land use not just not setback the required 7.5 metres from the lot line (a distance that any construction would have to follow, not just light industrial), but apparently allowed to spill several metres over that line onto someone else’s property.

Note the section above on patios, picnics, parties, jam sessions, and more – it appears Rob and Christine may have invited the whole world to hang out in someone else’s back yard.

rules are for other people, and reality is whatever we want it to be?

I’ll finish up here with a final look at bylaw infringements.

In December 2023, Daniel Martin and Liam Edwards presented a recommendation for renewing the TUP for Riley’s Cidery for a further three years saying that there had been three early bylaw complaints and an environmental concern, but that the bylaw concerns weren’t environmental, and all had been resolved rapidly at the time. As two of the bylaw complaints, and the environmental concern, came from us, and see my discussion above, well, not true.

“Resolved” appears to mean Liam’s email to Ross Adamson, their mutual dismissal, and no action – both BIM and VCH making it entirely, abundantly, clear to us that neither would take their actual responsibilities seriously or, ever, do anything to manage, regulate, or even admit the light industrial wastewater issue.

Clear I believe to Rob and Christine, as it appears to have been clear to them well before they even received the TUP, that they were free to do as they pleased; I’ll look at VCH, and Ross Adamson’s pliability, later, but let’s finish up with the WASP bylaw for now.

Google Earth provides historical imagery of land – the images below show the same area of expanding disturbed earth on the cidery lot, first in May 2021 and second, in March 2024, with the reference images matched exactly to scale.

The image below shows the disturbed area, with clear geometric forms indicating structures, in March 2024, red circle to indicate that area, blue line to indicate Murray Creek – using the map’s scale, the far right of that circled area of land is about 2m from the creek, but at the top of a steep drop down to the creek bed.

BowMap shows it too – the ortho mapping below isn’t precisely dated, but by a precise if idiosyncratic dating method (horse trailer and horse across the road, but no jumps in ring, the deciduous trees not in leaf, cidery is complete with full patio, sundry other neighbourhood signs) the distinctive patch of brown shows soil that has been turned, in a DPA, no permission, most likely ca March 2022:

No permissions because first of all, no-one would get informed or formal permission for that in a DPA that close to and above a creek – but second, because when you search BIM’s development permits, there is nothing there.

I’ll get to why March 2024 is a significant date later. Just mark for now that Rob Purdy, with Tyler Ruggles and Doug Woods on-site April 2021, was well aware long before March 2024 of BowMap, of the WASP DPA requirements, and he was certainly aware that we were concerned about the work being done in that exact area.

He and Christine saw me looking at and filming that area from the road in April 2021 and called out to me by name (somewhere, I have a brief very shaky phone video from then – I was scared, upset, and my hands shook so much I couldn’t press record or do much of any use – the photos included here were taken later in May, mostly by someone else). Interestingly, although he complained to Tyler in May about that (about me filming) when Tyler returned to actually, finally, look at the area above the creek, Rob didn’t mention it to Tyler or Doug Woods in April or include that area on the tour he gave them of the property then.

But you mostly tune it out, and mentally go la-la-la, I can’t hear you – as when neighbours further up the hill took their domestic arguments outside.

When Rob and Christine’s boys screamed with excitement and ran up the hill when the RCMP cruiser came along our road, well, heard all that too. I chatted to Rob about it, over the fence, a couple of days later when I went for a walk – him telling me how the RCMP officers turned on their siren light when they were up at the top of Laura Road in response to the boys’ excited company. That was the week before Rob and Christine went to Council with the TUP proposal.

I knew Rob and his boys – spent day after day walking along the road, waiting for the bus with them, me going to work, them to school and preschool, before Covid – playing a game where we all predicted the colour of the cars we could hear coming up Bowen Bay hill. I knew Christine too – not as well, she didn’t do the school run as often as Rob – but both of them would give me a ride to the Cove when they drove the kids instead of taking the bus. And I asked plenty of getting to know our new neighbours questions – he’s from New Brunswick, worked in the UK, etc, and I waved or said hello, chatted with Rob particularly, if I passed by them outside when I walked along the road – like during Covid, when I asked how they were doing, and if Christine (a nurse) was ok – she was, the diabetes clinic where she worked operated fully remotely.

Turns out that chat, about the RCMP cruiser, was right before Rob and Christine discussed the TUP with Council, where the same Rob, who in two years of talking to me had never once mentioned the cidery or a TUP, had this to say:

…then for notifying neighbours, it’s been it’s been a very tough year to engage neighbours. We moved to the property about a year and a half or two years ago, the bulk of that has been COVID, and we’re on five and ten acre properties. It’s not the type of neighbourhood where you see your neighbours and you can’t, I know from my experience, you can’t really walk down somebody’s driveway and knock on their door right now, that scares the pants off of most people in COVID times. I’ve had unexpected people come here and I was caught off guard, so we haven’t gone around and sort of door knocked, and there’s some new neighbours that are either building or not here yet, that we just don’t have their phone numbers frankly to call them. So it’s been a kind of a function of that. We’d love to just go around both West Side Road and Laura Road, I think those are the most impacted properties, and to what we’re doing and speak to everybody. It’s just tricky to do that right now.

In the email exchange with Rob alluded to earlier (ca March 10, 2021) we brought this up – Rob’s response?

– the reason we submitted a TUP was to be transparent with what we are doing and we genuinely want to hear your (and all our other neighbours’) feedback.  I’m sorry that our timing has come across the way it has, Heather and I have gotten to know each other since we moved in but Christine I don’t think we’ve had the chance to meet yet – my feeling is that most people in our neighbourhood, including us, are quite private which makes it difficult to really get to know each other. 

Funny how no matter the situation or audience, they can always finds a self-flattering angle to present themselves. Turns out they didn’t (don’t?) really want to hear any feedback but unmitigated praise – to the degree that the weekend before the TUP was passed, they were selling to Councillors the false narrative that concerned and opposed neighbours (like us) had not engaged with them at all – after, in ten days, we answered the phone message left by Christine, asked a ton of questions in three sets of emails, and had a doorstep conversation.

It was enormously distressing, at the time preceding and after the TUP, to constantly hear so much of what went on on the cidery site, with no reprieve, and in a context where we felt this existential anxiety about our water, which no-one else cared about. Hearing things like Christine’s hour long recitation to a friend of the victim narrative she’d constructed, or the employee or friend who regularly drove out of the cidery, turned onto Westside Road, and paused on that corner, right by our home, to honk their horn, day after day. To hear hours of construction noise, machinery and beeping, what sounded like drilling, day after day after day.

Whatever uses that land is being put to, it is the disturbance and continual use of land right above a creek in a DPA, on a steep slope, with no environmental assessments, consideration or permits – when they know that those are required.

And this matters. It’s not just about ignoring or flouting silly rules, or not bothering with needless red-tape – the protections for watersheds, streams , best practices, safe distances, leave areas, are pragmatic, considered, and necessary.

There is no defensible ground for everyone just pretending none of this matters for the cidery, or letting this use – and others – hide behind a hazy, romantic, rural fantasy about what farming is, and what a cidery is. And not only no defensible ground, but in real – pollution – terms, no defence in romantic fantasy from real-world consequences. And there is a real, ongoing and escalating danger to an already stressed and vulnerable resource (Bowen Island’s water supply) in not being willing or able to admit and face the mistakes made in allowing this TUP.

But, as seems entirely apparent, Rob and Christine, as with their signed guarantee to VCH re using fruit off the ground (see the meaningless promises section of this previous post), have for whatever reasons a developed sense of their own exceptionality, which has been nurtured and reinforced when it should have been challenged. They agree to following and respecting professional standards, legislation, and regulation, for human health and environmental protections, for instance assuring Tyler and Doug they’ll reach out to the Municipality before working in a DPA, but then just ignore this in practice. This is something we’ll see again when we look at the permit VCH issued them, which also points to the tease above re March 2024.

Plenty more to come.