Bristol council is considering the future of a 95-hectare piece of land near Pontiac Station that a conservation organization has offered to purchase. 

Last fall the municipality received an offer to purchase the land from the Nature Conservancy of Canada. The property, a largely wooded piece of land with frontage on the Ottawa River, has been owned by the municipality since 1994 when it bought the lot for $60,000 from Stone Consolidated. 

According to an excerpt from THE EQUITY after the purchase, then-mayor Jack Graham said the land could come in handy if the public park at Norway Bay someday became overcrowded.

No development has ever occurred on the land, though ideas have been floated at council in the past. In 1999, a group of residents proposed to erect a nature park and beach on the site, but council eventually turned this proposal down, citing concerns from the cottagers in the Pontiac Station community. In 2000, Trois-Rivières developer André Bendwell proposed to build 105 log chalets on the property, but this too was not moved forward by council. 

Now with the NCC offering to purchase the land, Bristol councillor Greg Graham is urging the council to refuse the sale.

He said while Bristol has not yet made strides toward creating a park, the land has the potential for some sort of recreo-tourism use in the future.

“We have other issues to address first,” he said, adding that council could eventually look into creating a park, and that selling the land would prevent the municipality from determining its future. 

Bristol mayor Valerie Twolan-Graham said no final decisions have been made about the land’s future. The municipality received the offer during the municipal elections last fall, and only had a chance to look at the proposal for the first time at the Jan. 12 meeting.  

Twolan-Graham said since then, she has been hearing from concerned residents about the future of the property, which features a beach and is also bisected by the CN railbed used by off-road vehicles such as ATVs. 

She said an NCC representative will attend the Feb. 2 council meeting, when the council will present their own concerns about the future of the land. 

“We would like residents to continue to have use of a beautiful beach that they have used for years,” she said, adding that the use of the railbed is also an important sticking point. 

While NCC communications person Gabrielle Goyette could not comment on the offer to purchase, the organization also owns land two lots to the west of the one in question. She said that land is valued due to the presence of certain at-risk plants and animals. 

“The ecological value of the property is mostly the protection of the Blanding’s turtle habitat. Bristol has the largest known population of this threatened species in Quebec,” she wrote, adding that conservation efforts on the land include installing pond levellers to maintain the habitat for at-risk species like the Blanding’s turtle. 

Goyette wrote that there are trails available on the property, even though they are not properly marked. “The property remains accessible for hiking, sightseeing [and] bird-watching outside of the deer hunting season,” she wrote. The public can use land conserved by the NCC as long as it is not prohibited via signage. 

Per the NCC, activities that are not permitted on their properties include fires, overnight stays or camping, littering, and accessing with recreational vehicles. But Twolan-Graham said there may be some room to negotiate certain things, though the exact sticking points of the negotiation are not yet public.

“There hasn’t been a discussion for the past four years. We know there’s a public stake in it,” she said, adding that the public’s and the council’s concerns will be addressed on Feb. 2.  

While Graham acknowledges that the natural value of the land would be preserved by the NCC, he added that he would like to keep the municipality’s options open going forward, in case it did decide to create some sort of park. 

Twolan-Graham said she is not sure what kind of development could even be possible on this land, as it is currently inaccessible by road vehicles, and portions of it lay in floodplains and wetlands. 

She said she is not sure what kind of development can be done on the land since the municipality is still waiting on new floodplain mapping and wetland mapping to be completed.