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London city officials may go to court to seek fines after a developer clear-cut enough trees to cover 15 football fields.
Half of an 18-hectare woodlot that stood in a rural property near Lambeth was levelled before the city's ecologist, Bonnie Bergsma, investigated a complaint last week.
The city alleges the cutting, which it ordered halted Thursday, was done without a permit and Bergsma says it's the most extensive she's seen in her decade with the city.
"This is the biggest."
The city is considering taking the matter to court, Bergsma said.
"We're looking to see who we can pursue with charges."
If a company is found to have illicitly removed trees, it can be fined as much as $10,000 for a first offence and ordered to replant trees, Bergsma said.
The woodlot has maple, ash, beech, cherry and other deciduous trees and occupies one-quarter of a property west of Bostwick Road. It is owned by South Winds Development Co.
South Winds' president is Bill Graham, campaign manager in 2003 for mayoral candidate Vaughan Minor. His wife, Connie Graham, was a failed Ward 8 candidate last year.
Weeks before last week's discovery, South Winds hired Dan McDonald, a public relations expert and former executive assistant to then-mayor Tom Gosnell to field questions.
Asked yesterday why he'd been hired before the city intervened, McDonald said, "I think any responsible company dealing with issues around the environment tends to hire people like me."
McDonald said South Winds had planned to remove nearly all of the woodlot because the Graham family wanted to use it as farmland and were concerned about its condition.
"A specialist looked at the woods and deemed it to be in poor condition because of a fire in the 1980s," he said.
Asked for the name of the specialist, McDonald said, "I don't remember. I got a copy of the report, but it didn't have a corporate logo."
McDonald wouldn't say if South Winds has obtained a permit to cut trees, an issue he said was best addressed by a lawyer hired by the company, Elizabeth Cormier.
Cormier later said the company hadn't violated a city bylaw that regulates tree cutting because it was exempt. Asked which of the exemptions listed in the bylaw applied, Cormier said, "I don't want to get into which ones."
When Bergsma went to the site, she found three crews using six or seven chainsaws and three rubber-tired machines to cut down and drag out trees.
The crews said they had been led to believe a permit had been obtained and stopped their work when told that wasn't true, she said.
What remains of the woodlot looks "very nice," she said.
In November 2005, South Winds tried to sell the property, which was advertised as an "excellent location for a residential development site."
The listing agent then was city councillor Cheryl Miller, who says she stopped representing the property in May, although it was left on her website until yesterday.
"We made it clear when we went out (to prospective buyers) that the woodlot had to stay," Miller said yesterday.
"We never discussed using the woodlot for agriculture," she said.
Staff and citizen groups say the Forest City's tree cover of 16.2 per cent lags other cities. Last fall, council made it easier for woodland to be designated significant.