The city is planning the redevelopment of the Byron gravel pits once Lafarge, the current company, finishes their extraction project. With the completion of the realignment of Commissioners road the city has shifted its focus onto its next massive project.
For many years now, the city has been planning to turn the area into a recreational space for Londoners to use. The city has proposed three different plans for the area, with planned pathways and different pockets of the land to be used for different conservation efforts.
Ward 9 Councillor, Anna Hopkins, says the city has been quite eager to get on developing.
“We’ve been talking about developing the gravel pits for many many years and we are now finally reaching the stages where we’ve come up with a plan; It’s a wonderful opportunity for the pit now that it has to be naturalized.” said Hopkins.
The three plans show the different pathways, a beach, and a dirt bike park with plans on developing the areas around the peripheral areas of the pits.
“At the bottom of the pit, but there’s water there’s a lake there and so I think the naturalization I hear from the community is really important, as this the central part of the pit being naturalized, and It’s going to be looked at as we go through the process on trails and how do we use it and how do we connect to other areas like Springbank Park.” said Hopkins
Pockets of the pits have native vegetation to the area which the city plans to make part of the conservation plans, alongside a proposed area to be transformed into a wetlands.
We need to know a little bit more how that’s going to work and a lot of that is going to be undertaken when we start to develop it; we’ll be able to determine a little bit more as we go forward how to conserve the multi-use pathways and I think there’s a lot more to be determined with the recreational part.” said Hopkins.
Hopkins went onto say that the decision with which plan to go with will be determined by the first quarter of next year.
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