RIVER ‘AT RISK’
Volunteers who care for the Little Campbell fear for its future in the face of urban development in its watershed
The Little Campbell River is a hidden natural gem in a bursting metropolis of 2.5 million people.
Every year, more than 5,000 salmon annually return to its waters, muscling their way up from the river mouth at Semiahmoo Bay near White Rock, surging beneath the bustling Highway 99 freeway, and splashing their way through a watershed spanning 72 square kilometres.
For more than six decades, volunteer club members — 800, at last count — have lovingly cared for the Little Campbell under an omnipresent cloud of human encroachment.
“It’s known as the most productive salmon and trout river for its size in the Lower Mainland,” says Bob Donnelly, president of the Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club, which operates a productive hatchery built in 1984 on 11.5 hectares off 184th Street. “For the most part, it’s never been developed and that is what’s saved it.”
Yet it could also be lost in a flash with rampant development, he warns. “This whole thing is at risk. We’re trying to hold our finger in the dam right now and stop it from being destroyed.”
The hatchery’s indoor tanks and outdoor ponds are brimming with juvenile coho and chinook salmon, steelhead, and cutthroat trout — more than 100,000 to be released this spring alone. The goal is to have hatchery fish represent 25 per cent and wild fish 75 per cent of stocks returning to spawn.
Nature trails through the club’s property are open to the public and leashed dogs.
More than 100,000 school students have participated in the raising and releasing of fish into the wild, part of the club’s commitment to spreading the conservation message throughout the community.
At least 124 species of birds have been documented here, as well as mink, beaver, coyote, river otter, black-tailed deer, and the endangered Salish sucker. The river extends 24 kilometres through Sur-
rey and Langley.
Two weeks ago — and for the first time to anyone’s knowledge — a couple of harbour seals made their way upriver to the hatchery’s steel fish-counting fence, nine kilometres from the ocean, in hopes of a cheap meal.
“It gives an indication of the value of this river,” said Donnelly, a retired management consultant.
The list of developments planned for the Little Campbell watershed are mounting up.
The Metro Vancouver board of directors last month said it plans to hold a public hearing into Surrey’s push for a 145-lot, single-family residential subdivision, housing about 450 residents. The development
requires an amendment to the Metro 2040: Shaping our Future landuse designation map and the extension of regional sewer lines to the site, which is part of the Hazelmere golf course development.
The Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club did not officially endorse the Hazelmere project, but did not oppose it, either, after a third round of talks with the developer led to a promise of rehabilitation of Kuhn Creek, a tributary of the Little Campbell River, including retention ponds and stormwater improvements.
“We’ll go back and hold their feet to the fire,” Donnelly pledged. “We know if we’re being conned.”
Waiting in the background is another plan for about 250 hectares
in the South Campbell Heights area through which the Little Campbell River flows. The lands are currently mostly designated agricultural in Surrey’s official community plan, but are not part of the agricultural land reserve.
Donnelly is concerned that Surrey council ‘s latest plan for the area is inconsistent with the city’s “urban containment boundary” and includes a “special commercial/institutional” zoning that he fears could have serious consequences for the Little Campbell River watershed, including its western red cedar forests.
“It’s now wide open,” he said. A city staff report says that the zoning designation could include care homes, educational institutions, churches, conference centres, hotels, restaurants, craft breweries, and other small-scale commercial uses.
The Surrey First civic party currently controls all nine seats on council, but insists it is not abandoning the environment in favour of development.
Surrey Coun. Mike Starchuk, chair of the environmental sustainability advisory committee, said he believes that green space protection and streamside setbacks will prove sufficient to protect the Little Campbell River.
“We’re doing a good job,” he said of council’s environmental record, while touting the city’s state-of-theart biofuel plant as “our newest treasure.”
Earlier this month, a new Surrey civic party emerged — Surrey Community Alliance, describing itself as the coalescence of the former Surrey Civic Electors and Surrey Matters parties, which included former mayor and longtime councillor and farmland advocate Bob Bose.
The new party says it seeks to bring balance and diversity to council in this October’s civic election and to give greater priority to environmental protection, arguing the current council is too indebted to the financial support of developers and does not sufficiently listen to the public.
“How can we avoid destruction of our green spaces?” asked Surrey Community Alliance president Doug Elford, an environmental protection officer in Vancouver who twice ran unsuccessfully for civic office in Surrey.
“We want more responsible development versus development at any cost for profit.”