Thursday, June 23, 2011

The questionable environmental conservation plan of the Marine Trail Resort

This contribution deserves its own post.  Mike D. from Victoria sent me the following picture and text:
Hi Tom,
Much has been said about Mr. Ilkay's promises to preserve most of the Marine Trail properties under a conservation covenant. CRD documents preach that "the proposal addresses protection of the park by dedication and covenanted protection of 86% of the site and would remove the possibility of clear cut logging and resource extraction from the currently permitted uses" [source: report to the Juan de Fuca land use committee meeting of tuesday april 19 2011].   
Sounds great, right? 
Well...I found this text buried in the legal documents for the Marine Trail Resort proposal being considered by the CRD: "no tree of any species, including bushes and shrubs.... may be trimmed, pruned, cut down, damaged, destroyed, moved, harvested or removed, except that a tree may be thinned, trimmed or pruned to preserve forest health or to provide a view from any of the Cabins which has been diminished by natural tree growth"[source: CRD board agenda June 15 2011, page 131]
Thanks for bringing that to our attention Mike! That's messed up.  This is no conservation covenant, its a license to clearcut at will. Mr Ilkay's own website for the marine trail resort confirms this plan for tree thinning (on the "sustainability objectives" page no less!)

"Some of the undeveloped area that is retained within the resort will have the forest thinned to allow light in and encourage understory growth. This will, in turn, provide foraging grounds for a variety of species."

Here's the picture Mike sent in:
Ender Ilkay promises that 86% of his Marine Trail Resort properties will be protected from logging under a conservation covenant.  Unfortunately, the covenant expressly allows for trees to be "thinned" and "trimmed" to maintain the view of the ocean from any of his cabins. This is conservation??
Some more folks have been making use of the ROFLbot photo captioner at http://wigflip.com/roflbot/
It's easy! Upload your picture, type in your caption and their website combines the two. Then you can host your new image on your blog, e-mail it to me, or publish it to http://imgur.com/ (a free, no-registration-needed image hosting service)

Here's some of the latest. These are courtesy of a friend in East Sooke:

Real Estate developer Ender Ilkay displays a chart at a public meeting, proving that he does indeed own all our shit. Charts don't lie! (neither do captioned photos)
We get signal: Developer Ender Ilkay claims ownership over all our wilderness..... we think. It is belong to him? Clearly we have no chance to survive make your time
Then there's this one from Brendan inVictoria:
"Like a deer in headlights, Ender is slow to respond to danger. Watch out Mr. Ilkay! Public opposition is rising!"
I wasn't sure that the public could be any more outraged than they were before, but life is just full of surprises. Maybe the people united can defeat our evil overlords after all?
Thank you for the contributions!

Developer Ender Ilkay and his concrete dreams

This was found on flickr. Seems like developer Ender Ilkay has some competition in the area from "Concrete Dreams Inc."

This real estate company wants to pave the region, evict all the wildlife, and sell a new resort community along the Juan de Fuca trail.

Ender Ilkay now competing with Concrete Dreams Inc??
Click image for fullsize

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Ender Ilkay says "Environmentalists are harassing me!"

Thanks to Zoe for this week's new contributions!


Environmentalists are harassing me (actual quote)
Poor Ender Ilkay. Environmentalists are harassing him by buying the mining rights to his land and trumping his threats to open a gravel mine if he can't build his huge resort on Juan de Fuca trail. It's a sad day when millionaire developers can't even destroy a provincial park in peace. (courtesy of http://wildcoast.ca)

According to Zoe, "environmentalists are harassing me" is a real quote from Ender Ilkay, the would-be destroyer of the Juan de Fuca trail.  If it's true, then we have our first photo that's legitimately captioned with a direct quote. Well done Zoe!

Ender Ilkay, why would anyone want to do business here?
 That's a good question! If I were in business, I'd go where the local market is actually supportive. Does Mr. Ilkay think hostile locals will be good for sales?