(KJIPUKTUK), HALIFAX - Efforts to slow down a high-priced development on an infilled water lot along the shores of the Bedford Basin are beginning to pay off.

Efforts that started six years ago.

Mark Currie remembers being flabbergasted at the time. At a public meeting a spokesperson for the Waterfront Development Corporation had just announced that there was no reef and there was no tidal pool at Mill Cove in the Bedford Basin.

So Currie's concerns about infilling a pristine part of the Bedford Basin were not an issue, the spokesperson told the crowd.

Currie knew that was not true.

“From where I was sitting that was misinformation. This was in 2008, 2009. My son was younger than, and I would take him him down to the area, just to muck around the reef, throw rocks, look at starfish and crabs in the tidal pool,” Currie tells the Halifax Media Co-op.

And so a community activist was born.

Shortly after the public meeting Currie and supporters established the Save The Bedford Reef Society. The group opposes the infill of parts of the Bedford Basin by the Crown Corporation.

It wants a proposed development reduced in size and the site at least partly transformed into a coastal park.

Despite diligently getting the message across, the Bedford residents were not able to stop the infill.

Crosby Island is an island no more. The waters around the former Bedford landmark have mostly been filled.

The material used to infill is pyritic slate, a naturally occurring rock excavated during development that was trucked here from anywhere in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

If not disposed of properly the slate creates acid runoff, but when submerged in seawater it is deemed safe by the Department of Environment. The group claims that long-term effects of the slate disposal are not understood. 

The infill has created a large parcel of land where once there existed a tidal pool providing shelter and nutrients to a variety of fish and migratory bird species.

Maybe, just maybe, the group's persistence is beginning to pay off.

“We're talking about digging a trench around the island," Andy Fillmore of the Waterfront Development Corporation told the CBC on Thursday.

“What we're looking at is not removing all the fill that was around the island, but removing enough of the fill that it would be an island at high tide."

And the Bedford Ledges, an adjacent reef area once slated for infill, will be spared, the Waterfront Development Corporation says.

Plans certainly are a lot less ambitious now. While in 2010 the Waterfront Development Corporation was proposing a development that could house as many as 6000 people, now the talk is about 1200 housing units, a park, boardwalks, and a community centre, perhaps a library.

Currie likes what he hears. But it is not quite good enough, he says.

“We're not naive, we know we still have a long fight ahead. Nothing is written in stone. They have said that hey want to save the Bedford Ledges and possibly restore Crosby Island as an island, but for now they're just looking into it,” he says.

The Waterfront Development Corporation says that it wants 50 percent of the development to be parkland.

Currie doesn't buy that.

“That 50 per cent consists of lands that are all chopped up and located between buildings, little strips of grass, that's totally unacceptable to us,” says Currie. “The entire footprint is covered with buildings. We want something substantial.”

Some Bedford residents don't want any development at all on the site, Currie adds, but the group wants to be reasonable.

A park would be a proper restitution for a community that for years had to put up with a disposal facility for acid rock, Currie believes.

“I am an optimist,” says Currie. “I think they can so something amazing with this site.”

“The world's eyes were on the new Central Library, because some really creative and visionary people got together and pulled of something that was totally amazing.  

My God, what an opportunity to something similar here and turn this enormous natural tidal pool on Bedford's waterfront into a park for humans and wildlife to share.”

Save the Bedford Basin Reef is on Facebook. And on Twitter

See also:

Rally calls for end to Bedford Basin shoreline destruction

Follow Robert Devet on Twitter  @DevetRobert