As I mentioned a few of weeks ago, the land across the road from us has been bought by a developer and they are planning to build over 700 homes in that area. My neighbours have formed a little group (called Smart Growth Elora + Fergus) to form a united front when dealing with the developer and the township. I volunteered to maintain the website.

As part of my website duties, I went for a walk with Kai around the entire perimeter of both the Haylock and Youngblood properties, and took a series of panoramas to document the current state of things. All of the panoramas can be found on the SGEF website, as well as some photos of trees that Cheryl (who lives down the road) took.

This is one of my favourite panoramas from that day. It was taken just down the road from my house, and it shows the part of the Haylock property that runs along South River Road, the stand of ~20 year old trees at the top of the hill that we are trying to convince the developer to save, and the big sign put up by the Township to notify us of the planned zoning changes.

It will be interesting to see how this all pans out. The developer held a public meeting in Aboyne to discuss the plan with the nearby residents. Angela and I went, and most of our neighbours were there as well. I even stood up and asked the developer a few questions. I didn't really get an answer, but the point was really to let them know that I'm not convinced that their plan is the greatest, especially since the mayor and several councillors were in the room as well. The current word is that the township has deferred the meeting about zoning changes to the fall, so we have a few months to put together some sort of coherent response to the proposed plan.

In the last few weeks, more details have been made available about the planned subdivisions, so I might do another overlay graphic like the one I did before, but this time showing the plan for both properties.

Technical Details: This panorama consists of 9 photos taken with my 5D Mark II + EF 17-40L at 19mm, ISO 200, f/8 for 1/640th of a second. They were stitched together using Photoshop's panorama function.