The City of Kingston is committed to managing the former Belle Park Landfill Site in an environmentally responsible way. Since 1997, the City has undertaken a number of projects to protect and improve the environment at Belle Park. The City continues to work with the Ministry of Environment and the community to design and implement a long-term solution for Belle Park — solutions that will protect the environment, be publicly acceptable and be financially sustainable.

Belle Park (also known as Cataraqui Park) is a landfilled marshland area that extends into the Kingston Inner Harbour from the west shore of the Cataraqui River to Belle Island.

The site is approximately 44 hectares (108 acres) in size. Citizens, businesses and institutions in the City of Kingston used this site as a municipal landfill from 1952 to 1974. After the landfill was closed in accordance with Ministry of the Environment requirements, the City developed the site into a multiple-use recreational facility that includes a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, and walking paths. Golf operations ended in 2017.

In 1996, the City completed the first Environmental Impact Study of Belle Park to determine site conditions, assess risks to park users and the natural environment and recommend measures to control environmental impacts. As a result, several important projects were completed, including:

• Construction of groundwater interception wells that control seepage toward the river
• Placement of clean soil covers over areas where landfill cover was too thin
• Ongoing annual monitoring of groundwater, surface water and wastewater
• Weekly shoreline surveillance

Later, in 2006 the City completed an evaluation of long-term management alternatives for the closed landfill. This work resulted in the current environmental management model that uses groundwater control pumps, phreatophyte tree plantings and site monitoring to protect the adjacent Cataraqui River.

Belle Park is also included in Kingston’s Project Track down – a joint effort between the City and the Province in 2005 to identify potential sources of PCB contamination in advance of a small river sediment clean-up project at Emma Martin Park. The work concluded that Belle Park was not a source of ongoing PCB contamination.