Saint John denies special designation for Rockwood Park

An attempt to have Saint Johns Rockwood Park designated as a cultural landscape under the provincial Heritage Act failed on Monday night.

City council unanimously rejected a pitch from the Friends of Rockwood Park to protect the urban park without discussion at its weekly meeting.

Joan Pearce, a member of the group, said Saint John already has heritage-designated parks so she said she thought Rockwood Park qualified nicely under the cultural landscapes section of the provincial Heritage Act.

After fighting a development proposal inside the park last year, Pearce said she and a number of other citizens began to worry it may again become a target for development.

"If they decided they wanted the property for residential development, or any other kind of development, that they could just go ahead and take the property away from the park," she said.

Rockwood Park has 890 hectares of wetlands and forest.

Saint John developers had planned to create a series of "high-quality" homes on about 14 hectares of property inside Rockwood Park.

But in January 2011, Saint John council voted to halt the development.

Limiting options

The request by theFriends of Rockwood Park for the designation was rejected by council unanimously on the advice of city managers, who noted the city has too many designated properties and no money or staff to oversee them.

Coun. Shirley McAlary said the designation would limit future options for the city.

"You never know what development might come up in the future that we might want to accept. And once you designate it as heritage, you are limited in what you can allow to happen there," McAlary said.

Pearce said the city councillors should have waited for a recommendation from the city's heritage board before voting on the request.

"It should have gone to the heritage board. The heritage board [includes] the people who make a recommendation to council,"Pearce said.

"It's not the city manager and senior city staff that does that. That's the way I understand the process to work."

Ken Forrest, the citys commissioner of growth and development, said in a statement on Tuesday the city is not obligated to refer such requests to the heritage board.