A Queensborough mom can’t leave her home’s windows open or let her kids play outside because of sawdust generated by a nearby mill.
Katherine Thomson was one of two Queensborough residents appearing at the Feb. 13 city council meeting voicing concerns about a new application that Metro Vancouver is considering for the site.
“The amount of sawdust that comes in is crazy; it's just crazy,” she said. “It's unacceptable.”
Thomson said she bought her Port Royal home six years ago, after the developer indicated the nearby mill would be closing and a grocery store would be built on the property.
“It's so bad that – I'm not even exaggerating – my kid cannot go outside,” she said. “He goes outside to play soccer, and he'll run back inside, like, ‘Mom, I can't, I can't breathe; there's dust in my eyes. It's so gross.’”
When their house flooded, the family stayed with family members who live a few blocks away in Queensborough. Thomson’s son’s breathing was “totally fine” when they stayed at their relatives’ home.
“It just has to be the mill,” she said. “We open our windows – it’s on all of our floors, it is in our window sills.”
If she opens her windows in the summer, Thomson said sawdust lands on her kitchen island.
“It can't be safe,” she said.
Thomson said she’s been complaining to Metro Vancouver about air quality concerns related to the mill for four years. She said the air quality and the particulate from the mill are so bad that her family can’t use their backyard and she’s covered up their garden.
“There's no point – it’s just full of sawdust in the breeze,” she said.
A Feb. 13 staff report stated that Metro Vancouver received an application for an air quality permit application for Cedar Island Re-Manufacturing, a lumber remanufacturing facility at 320 Ewen Ave. Metro Vancouver, which is responsible for air quality, invited the city to review the environmental protection notice for the application and to provide comments to Metro Vancouver for its consideration.
According to the environmental protection notice, Cedar Island Forest Products Ltd.is a remanufacturing facility that provides cut lumber and produces fence panels. In operation since 1994, the facility has two “active product cyclones” which both collect sawdust for resale.
“Both cyclones exhaust particulate emissions to ambient air,” said the notice.
The notice goes on to say that the purpose of the application is to request authorization to discharge air contaminants from the two “process cyclones” controlling wood dust from various saws and planers and two “fugitive operations” and plant-wide fugitive emissions.
Port Royal resident Vesna Stojanovic told council on Monday that there are “traumatizing statistics” about the impacts that inhaling particulate has on human health, including diseases and a shortened lifespan. She noted that she had previously appeared before council in 2021 to express concerns about noise pollution, rodents and air pollution impacts the mill was having on the Port Royal community.
Mayor Patrick Johnstone questioned whether the public has had an opportunity to review the permit application, noting he was unable to find the application online. He suggested council ask Metro Vancouver to delay making a decision on the application until information has been shared in a way that people know what is being proposed.
Coun. Nadine Nakagawa said she’d also like the city to also express concerns about the air quality impacts associated with the application, given what council has heard from residents living near the site.
Coun. Daniel Fontaine said he’d like to “take it one step” further and have council tell Metro Vancouver that it doesn’t support any additional emissions beyond what's already existing at the site.
Council unanimously supported a motion asking Metro Vancouver to delay approval of the permits and expressing opposition to any additional emissions at the mill.
Conflicting land uses?
Fontaine questioned if the city has a strategy around leaving a buffer between residential development and commercial/industrial uses.
“It doesn't seem to have happened in this case,” he said. “I was actually quite surprised to see how close people's living room and bedroom windows are to the mill.”
Jackie Teed, the city’s acting director of climate action, planning and development, said the change that put these residential and industrial uses in close proximity to each other occurred was when the Queensborough’s previous official community plan was created and approved by council many years ago.
“The Port Royal area was all industrial, and at the time that that community plan was created, the Port Royal property was changed in designation to residential,” she said. “So it was back at that time that the switch that brought residential and industrial uses so close together occurred.”
The Port Royal site, which was home to the MacMillan Bloedel mill for decades, was designated as medium-density residential in the community plan. The Queensborough community plan – developed at a time when industrial operations had started leaving Queensborough – gave owners the ability to continue using the land for industrial businesses or applying for a rezoning to change to residential uses.
Lynn Roxburgh, the city’s supervisor of land-use planning, said the Cedar Island Forest Products site was given a residential designation in that community plan, and the city expected that transition to happen faster, given the industrial redevelopment that was taking place at that time.
“It's really up to that owner,” she said, noting that the city is trying to manage the different land uses in the interim.
Fontaine said he’s spoken to Queensborough residents who invested their life savings so they could buy homes in Port Royal, with the understanding that the mill site was going to be home to a grocery store and café. He questioned if residents were told the mill was going to be converted to a different use.
“There's a lot of other industry that's still there,” he said. “Have we learned from this, or is this something that we would continue to approve in the future knowing that?”
Teed said that the current Queensborough community plan envisions the industrial properties near Port Royal would change to retail and commercial uses. She told council the city has had one or two inquiries about the Cedar Island Forest Products site through the years, but it hasn’t received an application for the site to be used for a grocery store or any other kind of use.
Nakagawa said she’d like to consider how the city could ensure that people aren’t being given “the rose-coloured glasses” version of plans and timelines for a neighbourhood by developers.
“I just want to say to the residents: we have heard you,” she said. “Unfortunately, this … application isn’t something that we have jurisdiction over. So we can certainly express and advocate and do our best, but it is a challenging process as well.”
