Wilmot Township, ON – Over 230 acres of natural lands offering trails for hikers and cross-country skiers in Wilmot Township are under threat as Wilmot Township Council delays a plan to donate these lands to a local conservation land trust.
Schneider Woods, located on Wilmot Township’s boundary with the City of Waterloo, are being donated by their owners, the Schneider Family, to rare Charitable Research Reserve. News of the donation was first shared in the media in July 2023 and received with much excitement in the community. “This arrangement has been over four years in the making,” says Peggy Schneider. “We feel that rare, a registered charity working as a land trust in Waterloo Region and Wellington County, are well prepared to steward this land as part of their mandate, while continuing to allow casual public access to the property, as it is now, and has been for over 40 years.”
The proposed donation would take three residential properties the Schneider Family owns and sever the land around their current homes. The remaining land would be combined into a single property that would be transferred to rare. These properties are already a popular spot for cross-country skiing and trail use by locals, due to their pristine beauty near the urban areas of the region.
“The Schneider Family has very generously opened these lands to the public for decades, and they want this arrangement to continue,” says Stephanie Sobek-Swant, Executive Director at rare. “They have asked us to carry on their legacy and the stewardship of these lands in order to maintain them in their current state and at their current level of use.”
Wilmot Township Council, while holding up the planning applications to sever and transfer the lands that were first submitted in March 2023, has demanded that an additional parking lot be built on the site. “There is no need for such construction. There’s plenty of legal side-of-the-road parking already available,” says Peggy. “Not only would it be costly to build and maintain, but it would also disrupt our neighbours and destroy the beautiful land where it would be built.”
“There’s no legal requirement for an additional parking lot, given that there is no change in usage but merely a change in ownership proposed,” adds Stephanie. “The Grand River Conservation Authority has told us that they likely wouldn’t approve such construction because of the proximity to provincially significant wetlands and the ecological damage it could cause. These lots can also attract activities such as drinking and the dumping of trash to the area.”
The Schneider family has called on the community to contact the mayor and other members of the Wilmot Township Council and ask that less intrusive alternatives be considered, and that council move quickly to allow this donation to proceed. Sensible alternatives have been suggested by rare as part of the severance application and other supporters of the project, and could see improvements to roadside parking such as additional signage and traffic calming solutions, if the municipalities work together collaboratively and make these options a priority.
Excessive delays put the donation at risk, as well as public access to one of the last remaining large parcels of unprotected ecologically significant land in Waterloo Region.
“After the news came out about the Schneider Family’s donation back in July, we were told options are being worked on, but since then there has been little movement on the part of Wilmot Township Council and we’ve heard that it can be months or even years until this is resolved,” says Stephanie. “That’s more than disappointing. We don’t have years. These delays threaten the donation, as well as federal funding earmarked to help with the planning costs of this donation. In a growing Region, the protection of the environment and balancing public access should be a top priority to municipalities. With the proposed changes to the Greenbelt we have seen how quickly land can be reallocated to development, rare is able to ensure that this won’t happen locally.”
“Our father passed away in 2011 and our mother is 94,” Peggy Schneider explains. “If our mother passes away before this donation is finalized, it will trigger taxation that could require that these lands be sold out of the family, so action needs to be taken now. This is my mother’s wish, and we would like Wilmot Township Council to honour it.”
“The donation will be part of the Federal government’s Ecological Gifts Program, which helps in the donation of environmentally sensitive lands to protective land trusts like rare, that have been through Environment Canada’s rigorous certification program,” says Dr. Tom Woodcock, Planning Ecologist at rare. “We’ve secured significant funding from the federal Nature Smart Climate Solutions program and needed to request an extension due to these holdups, and we risk losing that support if the delays persist for much longer.”
Further information about the issue, including an open letter by the Schneider Family, can be found at raresites.org/schneider-call-to-action.
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(Photo below: A field in Schneider Woods, with an old fence, under a setting sun, taken by Stephanie Sobek-Swant on February 1, 2023.
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