The following article appeared in the October 3 edition of the Guelph Mercury:
Hilltop Road residents may feel imprisoned in their yards if a proposed retaining wall is completed behind their homes.
Where once there was a vista of rolling farm fields, soon there could be a big grey wall.
“It will cut off our view totally,” Mark Gallina said. “We won’t be able to see anything but that wall.”
Nicknamed Attica, after the maximum-security prison located in Attica, N.Y., the 2.75-metre retaining wall will be topped with a 1.8-metre wooden privacy fence.
That’s a problem, said Ward 2 Councillor Ian Findlay.
The towering wall/fence combination would run down the boundary between four Hilltop homes and a new development being built by Fusion Homes in Guelph’s north end.
City council approved the development without knowing about the retaining wall, Findlay said. Plan drawings at council did show the six-foot wooden privacy fence, which is legal.
But Findlay said the plans did not include the retaining wall.
“We didn’t get an elevation drawing,” he said. “None of us knew what was happening.”
Findlay and councillor Vicki Beard sized up the site Monday and met with concerned residents, city engineers and Fusion officials.
“I would not have passed that,” Beard said.
A trench has been dug for the base of the retaining wall, but for now, Fusion has stopped working on it.
“They do have approval to proceed, and they don’t have to listen to the neighbours,” Findlay said. “But they are taking it into consideration.”
Fusion may decide to make the wall half a metre shorter and plant some vegetation in front of it, he said.
Beard and Findlay were scheduled to have a private meeting with city staff yesterday to mitigate the situation.
But the city has no height restriction on retaining walls, and with an approved plan in place, there may be little they can do.
“The city councillors have been great and really helpful,” Gallina said. “But something is screwed up in the planning department.”
Gallina is concerned about a drop in the property value of his home, which he said could be $20,000 to $25,000.
When he purchased the home in 2005, he was told the property behind it could never be developed due to the slope of the land.
“That was a real selling feature,” he said.