Editor: Langley Township has been in existence for decades without a tree bylaw, and yet we still have an abundance of trees. There seems to be this imagined threat that, without a tree bylaw, men armed with chainsaws will clear cut the Township just because there is no bylaw to stop them.
On our farm, we have removed at least a few thousand trees over the last 60 years. They have provided firewood for heat in the house. Six alder trees per week are needed in the smoke house at the family butcher shop. In recent years, we have cleared more land and removed trees that started dying due to disease, and also trees that got too big and became a threat to safety. I have also planted lots of trees, but I am careful to plant them where they won’t become a threat to people and buildings.
Trees have a limited life span, and not all trees are worth saving. Before Christmas, an alder next door came down in the wind, taking down a power line and ripping a transformer from the pole. The same day a fir crashed across the road, just missing the power line. At my sister-in-law’s place, a massive hemlock came down from across the road, ripping all the wires off the power pole and barely missing the house.
The tree was about three feet in diameter and 125 feet long. It took a week and a half for me to clean it up, having to haul everything away. From the clean-up of these trees, the refuse is in my field waiting for burning season.
My point is that trees require maintenance and I shouldn’t have to ask permission every time I need to take down a tree, either for firewood or safety, and neither should anyone else.
Regarding the Township charging a company for taking down trees on an industrial property in Gloucester, what are they thinking? The land is zoned industrial, but a company can’t cut down trees to build a business? Gloucester was first proposed as an industrial area 45 years ago.
In Aldergrove, if land is left vacant for any length of time, it will become a forest. So the Township is penalizing a company because it didn’t buy and develop the land 10 years ago.
If you want to protect the land from development don’t zone it industrial, zone it as park land. If it was zoned agricultural, you wouldn’t prevent a farmer from clearing the land and planting crops. So why pick on one industry over another?
I am not necessarily pro-development, but I think it is important to realize that if land is zoned for residential development, that should be allowed to take place, hopefully with an overall neighbourhood plan.
The land surrounding Aldergrove, Murrayville, and Fort Langley is zoned agricultural. Unfortunately, densification is necessary because of the limited residential land available in Langley. The more people fight densification, the more pressure is put on the Agricultural Land Commission to remove land from the reserve for development. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
Mel Fast,
Aldergrove