Holding the IPM
Public Meeting Written by Jamie Downton, General Manager Heritage Heights Golf and Curling Club Sawmill Creek Golf Resort and Spa Camlachie, Ontario:
S
ince the introduction of the IPM Accreditation program by the Province of Ontario, there has been one main complaint and that is the public meeting component. It seems as though there has been a great deal of anger, fear, and just an overall worrisome attitude about this public meeting among the inner circles of the turf maintenance business. These worries are fueled, in part, by the threat of having some environmentalists make us superintendents a target for their endless crusades to save the world. Maybe these fears are warranted to some degree as I am sure most of you reading this have at some point in your career been approached by a “concerned citizen”, who feels as though the only tool available in our arsenal are pest control products. Well, I would like to fill you in on what we went through at Sawmill Creek Golf Resort and Spa in hosting our public meeting.
The Plan: After returning home from the OGCM Conference and Trade Show in Niagara Falls, I made the determination that I was going to get this public meeting done and out of the way, so I could put all of my energy into the 2012 golf season. I returned to our club, informed my General Manager of the latest amendments to the IPM program, and told him that we would be having our public meeting during the first couple of weeks in February. The first item on my preparation list was to obtain clarification from the Ministry of the Environment on the public notification clause. The issue I had with the public notification was simply the manner in which we must notify those within 100 meters of the property. Sawmill Creek has approximately 40 dwellings within our golf community, and approximately 30 of which are not a part of our development. Of course, when you are looking at notifying 70 homes about this meeting, you are surely going to run into at least one home, where the owners are on vacation for the winter (this does not take into account the difficulty in finding some contact information as well). My question for the Ministry was simple, at what point is it enough to have proved that we made every reasonable effort to make contact with the landowners of this property?
“I strongly believe we need to be transparent through this process.” – Jamie Downton I contacted the representative of the MOE, who had made a presentation at the OGCM show, and asked her this very question. She suggested to me that because I did have more than 50 homes to notify, that I may apply for an exemption to this requirement, with written details as to how I plan to inform these landowners. With my meeting date scheduled to occur within the next three weeks, I inquired as to the chances of receiving a response in time for our meeting. I was assured that I would. I made a written request to the Director of the MOE to instruct them of my plans and to ask for permission to insert the public notice into the mailboxes of any homeowners who we could not make direct contact with or to those for whom we did not have contact information. Since the residents of Sawmill Creek had provided us with their email addresses over the course of the past few years, we were able to reach out to these 40 residents with relative ease. However, it was
18 Green is Beautiful • Winter 2012