A silver lining, a pony and a needle

They say every cloud has a silver lining, somewhere. That inside every pit of manure is a pony. That every haystack, if searched thoroughly enough, contains a needle.

So it is, perhaps, with the saga of Lane Creek, that precious, partly subterranean body of water that flows through the heart of Wellington and out into Lake Ontario.

As the Times reported in its September 17 edition, a routine inspection of the creek’s underground passage beneath Main and Wharf Streets revealed that privately owned buildings had structural weaknesses. The problem was, the County had no way to compel the owners to fix their buildings, and therefore, no way to immunize itself from potential liability, should the creek be implicated in a building collapse. County staff considered the options and recommended diverting the creek, by way of an underground culvert, to run under municipally- owned Wharf Street. The County earmarked $640,000 for the job in its 2013 budget.

Then Quinte Conservation worried that the culvert was not sufficiently large enough to handle a once-in-a-century flood. The County resisted paying for a culvert larger than necessary to handle the existing creek flow, athough it ended up budgeting an additional $530,000 for the project in 2014.

And then, just as tenders were about to be issued, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans plunged in and asserted its right to speak for the fish that use the creek. It now appears the rerouting of the creek will be delayed by a couple of years. Unless, of course, the United Nations claims jurisdiction, in which case things will move along much faster.

All of this is clouds, manure and hay so far, right? Well, just maybe there is a silver lining, a pony and a needle in here somewhere. There is, if Wellington can start thinking big. Those big thoughts are the kind that would have put a roundabout at the corner of Wharf and Main, emulating the success of Warings Corners and signalling to the world that Wellington is not a lesser destination than the big burgh of Picton. Alas, that was not to be. But now that we are digging up the street again, the possibility rears its head once more.

But perhaps there is an even bigger vision that can be realized. What about turning the closed culvert into an open canal, so that gondoliers, punters, canoeists and rowers could ply their trade, turning Wellington into the Venice of Eastern Ontario? (Make that the Venice of Prince Edward County, because realistically we would have to line up behind the Rideau Canal in Ottawa and the Trent Canal in Trenton. But you get the idea).

Or, given the popularity of swimming with the dolphins experiences in warmer climes, how about turning the Lane Creek culvert into a sensory experience of swimming with the salmon—attempting to follow them upstream as they search out a spawning place?

Perhaps, taking the going upstream approach further, we could turn the the creek into a unique wave pool, where you could swim with the current, at least until you got washed out into Lake Ontario. Or turn the exercise into a form of ‘ironperson’ challenge, where only the mightily fit could make it all the way up to the point where the creek reaches the Millennium Trail.

Or maybe a going downstream approach would work better. In summer, the creek could become a unique, fish-friendly waterslide park and in winter, the best tobogganing experience this side of Quebec City’s Dufferin Terrace.

However, I suspect an even more elegant idea may be to use the culvert to address a second looming problem at the same time. That is the need for overflow parking emanating from the Drake Devonshire Inn. At present, a polite little sign tells visitors that if the Inn lot is full, parking is available at the United Church lot, or at the community centre a block (hmm—a big block) away. What better use of the Lane Creek opportunity, therefore, than to dig an underground parking garage around and beneath the new Lane Creek culvert? If developed with enough imagination, the garage could be positioned right under the culvert, which could be made transparent so that visitors could park their cars and admire Wellington’s new aquarium at the same time, thereby offering the most exciting views of marine life east of Toronto’s new Ripley’s Aquarium. Oh, sure, we’d have to knock a few buildings down in the process, but that’s just the price of progress.

Can’t be done, you say? I’ve got a silver lining, a pony and a needle that say it can.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca