Taxpayers often hear about asset management plans, especially around budget time. And for many municipalities, including Pelham, this can mean everything from equipment and fleet vehicles to roads, sidewalks and buildings owned by the corporation.
Often overlooked, however, are a municipality’s natural assets – things such as trees, watercourses, wetlands, agricultural lands and shorelines.
That is changing, however, according to Shannon Larocque, Pelham’s manager of planning, who said coming up with a natural asset plan was a natural fit with this term of council’s strategic priorities surrounding the environment and adapting to climate change.
“At a staff level, we were aware of natural asset management plans, and thought that that would be a really good initiative that the Town of Pelham could take on to try to achieve those council objectives,” Larocque said.
The fact that Pelham would even take on such a project is unique in itself, Larocque said.
“If you look at the communities that have actually done it so far, they’re communities like Nanaimo, (B.C.), they’re larger cities like Winnipeg and so, for a small town like Pelham to undertake this, it's pretty exciting and groundbreaking. It just demonstrates that we recognize that Pelham is a unique community, and we have some important natural assets and how important it is to maintain them.”
So, with funding help from the Greenbelt Foundation and in partnership with the Natural Assets Initiative, the Town recently completed the Pelham-Greenbelt Natural Asset Management Project, with the goal of the exercise being to help the Town integrate natural assets into its asset management and financial planning programs.
The study identified Pelham’s natural assets, including those that are a part of the provincial Greenbelt. The goals were to understand the role of natural assets that provide stormwater management and flood mitigation as well as determine the value of those assets in terms of providing a service, including determining the costs and benefits relative to an engineered alternative. The final objective of the project was to develop a strategy to manage natural assets. The report identified a total of 4,428 natural assets covering 10,458 hectares in Pelham. Of those, 26 percent of the assets were in very good condition while a further 12 percent were described as in good condition.
These natural assets provide about $6 million in stormwater management services to the town and “significantly contribute to preventing flooding and erosion,” a report on the project presented to council recently said.
Recommendations from the report include:
• Continue with the protection of existing natural spaces
• Use evidence-based decision making to manage natural assets
• Build awareness and partnerships
The Town has already worked in partnership with other agencies and groups on environmental projects, most notably the work to prevent erosion at the headwaters of 12 Mile Creek. That project — in partnership with the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority and (the former) Trout Unlimited Niagara— was completed last October.
“That’s a perfect example of the type of thing that we'd like to see more of in the future,” Larocque said. “We know that most of the natural assets in Pelham are not necessarily assets that the Town owns, or where we have jurisdiction. A lot of the assets where we're getting a lot of benefit, they're owned privately, or they're owned maybe by the province, like Short Hills Park, or the Nature Conservancy, like the Lathrop Nature Preserve.”
The Town will be working on incorporating natural asset management in Pelham’s Official Plan, Larocque said.
“(Asset management) directs where are you going to make key investments in the future so that you can protect, but also gain benefit and preserve,” she said.
Mayor Marvin Junkin, for one, agreed with the importance of natural assets and the need for municipalities to look after them.
“If you do something, if you destroy the natural assets, it takes a huge amount of manmade engineering to replace them and have them do what the natural assets do,” he said.
Pelham, he added, is an early adopter of a plan for protecting natural assets but he suspects it won’t be the last.
“I think it's just in the last couple of years that municipalities, or governments as such, have grown to realize how much these natural assets do to make the communities livable,” he said.
It was the realization that the Town is home to significant environmental areas – 12 Mile Creek and Shorthills Provincial Park for example – that put a spotlight Pelham’s natural assets, and that a study should be undertaken to determine what they mean to the Town.
“And as it turned out, those natural assets are worth quite a bit,” Junkin said.
Larocque, meanwhile, said staff are being educated about the report’s findings.
“We're still communicating the results and then we're going to be bringing it into our culture at the Town, so that people know that natural asset management is part of what we do,” Larocque said.
From there, the Town will begin to identify potential partnerships for future projects as was the case with 12 Mile Creek, she said.
