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Delta to put Southlands back in ALR
Double the workout!
Civic politicians starting process to return acreage to land reserve SANDOR GYARMATI
s g y a r m a t i @ d e l t a - o p t i m i s t .c o m
PHOTO BY GORD GOBLE
Ladner’s Melanie Phillips gets quite the workout as she does the stairs at Fred Gingell Park in Tsawwassen with daughter Lily in tow. Phillips, who was a runner and soccer player, says she was suffering from post-partum depression so started doing the stairs recently to help her recover. She does them a couple times a week.
Delta is starting the process of putting much of the Southlands back into the Agricultural Land Reserve. Civic politicians have agreed to send a request to the Agricultural Land Commission to have 111 hectares (276 acres) of the Tsawwassen property placed back into the reserve. The municipality will submit the application for two legal parcels adjacent to 3rd Avenue as a landowner, not as a local government, thereby forgoing the requirement of having a public hearing. The Southlands development application by Century Group received final approval this summer. The 215-hecatre (537-acre) property will eventually see 950 housing units built on 20 per cent of the site in an area that reportedly has the poorest soil quality. The remaining 80 per cent has been handed to Delta, much of it for farming. A report to council notes a large portion of the property is being leased by a local farmer and actively farmed. Century wants to lease approximately
FILE PHOTO
George Spetifore pitched a housing development for the Southlands decades ago.
18.7 hectares (46 acres) from Delta for small-scale farming use. The property was previously owned by the Spetifore family, which grew crops there as early as the 1930s. By the early 1970s, their operation, called Triple S Farms, was at 280 hectares (700 acres), producing mainly strawberries, potatoes, corn, pumpkin, squash, peas, beans and cucumbers. That was around the time George Spetifore unsuccessfully pitched a major housing development for the site. SOUTHLANDS: see Page 3
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