Incorporated in 1998, French Planning Services Inc.,  provides a range of services to help you through the lake planning process.

While we encourage your team to conduct as much of the planning process as possible, we offer the following services to enhance your approach and to provide backup for your volunteers, whenever it is needed:

Lake Planning 101 Seminars
From 20 minute presentations at your Annual General Meeting to special 2 hour sessions, these interactive seminars are designed to increase awareness about the importance of lake planning and encourage the participation of all interest groups in your watershed.

Design and Coordinate Your Lake Planning Process
Each lake association has its own hidden talents and resources. Our experience with other lake associations will help you to design a process that maximizes your local resources, meet the financial resources of your association and engage stakeholders (permanent and seasonal residents, commercial operators and government agencies). Questions that you may have, such as when should I conduct the surveys and workshops, how is the lake plan approved, and when do I contact the municipality, will be answered through specialized coaching. A proper and timely planning process is essential to the integrity of your plan and must be well thought out. 

Collect Background Information
Collecting and verifying background information is an integral component to assessing the current state of your lake. We can provide a work list of essential items to be collected that will assist you with deciding who and how this information will be collected. Unless there are urgent issues to be dealt with, our recommended approach is to gather all existing information on your lake from various sources and then decide if there are any gaps in information that need to be collected in the future. Where necessary, we are prepared to assist with the collection of information.

 Prepare Lake Plan and Supporting Documents
We can provide you with a general guideline to assist you with preparing your plan. The guideline provides you with a table of contents, sample maps and figures, and suggested text for you to consider, as well as information on how and what to write in each section, including links to websites with information that will further assist you. Where you are unable to prepare this information, we can help by writing it for you. From past experience we find that we are often involved in the data collection and preparation of the Natural Heritage Areas and Features section. The validity of this information is important to the integrity of your document and recommendations.

Prepare, Conduct Surveys and Compile Survey Results
We can provide you with a template that is full of survey questions for you to select from to help you prepare your questionnaires for residents and commercial operators. If necessary, we can prepare the survey, send it out and even compile the results. However, this is one area where your volunteers can maximize their talents and help to save costs.

Facilitate Workshops and Prepare Proceedings
Our facilitators have experience in working with a wide range of stakeholders to achieve consensus on contentious issues. Our workshops are designed to promote discussion between residents, commercial operators (resorts, marinas, campgrounds, private camps) and government agencies. Some of the topics to be covered at these workshops include: identifying and confirming issues, describing values, exploring memories, identifying special places, discussing volunteer efforts, obtaining best advice, reviewing recommendations, and setting strategic actions. We recommend that proceedings are prepared to record the major discussion points at each of these workshops, and we can provide you with examples or prepare professional documents for distribution to everyone on your lake or in your watershed. The preparation of proceedings is another area to involve your volunteers and save you costs.

Facilitate Meetings
Whether it is a special meeting of your municipal Council, provincial agencies or simply your Steering Committee meetings, we provide organizational and facilitation services to make sure positive discussion is promoted, as well as satisfy your objectives. Our experience with many other associations will benefit your association.

Land and Water Use Inventories
An inventory of private and Crown properties and land uses are integral components to help you understand the current and future pressures on your lake or watershed. You need to know the locations of seasonal and permanent residential uses, commercial operations, industrial, resource extraction, community facilities, cell towers, garbage dumps and more, and we can help identify and map this information.  

Design Stewardship Actions
Stewardship actions are an essential component of your lake plan. Besides understanding the land and water use regulations, you need to design stewardship actions that compliment these rules. An excellent example is with respect to the issue of preserving the quality of water for future generations. While there are a number of legislative and municipal regulations that people must abide by, there are stewardship actions that people must volunteer to do, such as: maintaining buffers, shoreline rehabilitation projects, septic system maintenance, water use and natural landscaping guidelines. Stewardship actions are those “environment friendly” matters that must be communicated to encourage lake property owners to do the right thing for their property and your lake.

Review Land and Water Use Regulations
There are many land use and water use regulations that affect the quality of life on your lake and there is a myriad of involved government agencies. Some of these include regulations and external planning processes involving municipal official plans, zoning by-laws, site plan control, tree cutting by-laws, park by-laws, shore road allowance by-laws, noise by-laws, Ontario Living Legacy Land Use Strategy, Enhanced Management Areas, Conservation Reserves, Forest Management Plans, Water Management Plans, Fish and Wildlife Management Plans, provincial and municipal parks, water regulations, septic regulations, and more. We can help make sense out of these regulations and provide recommendations to ensure contact is made with the right authority.

 Mapping Services
Everyone loves maps, especially maps that include their property and the surrounding area. We can provide a full range of mapping services to meet everyone’s budget. From simple reproductions of existing maps to the design and creation of specific “Community Lake Maps”; we can design a mapping program to meet your needs. Some of our products include: watershed maps, land use maps, natural areas maps, social and cultural features maps, navigational maps, and more. We encourage all associations to prepare a Community Map, which is a collection of all relevant information of the lake on one map that can be sold to all property owners on the lake or within the watershed. This map will hang inside the cottage or boathouse of everyone’s property and will be a great source of local information, as well as remind everyone to remain committed to the future health of your lake.

 Stream Assessments
Do you know how may streams flow into your lake? In almost every situation, there is little existing information about the streams and rivers that flow into and out of your lake. We can conduct an assessment of the health of your streams and provide appropriate recommendations on protection and rehabilitation. In most cases this is one of the top priority actions that come from the lake plan.

 Wetland Evaluations
We can conduct an evaluation of key wetlands on your lake or in the watershed. Whether this is implemented during the lake planning process or becomes one of the actions to be completed following the approval of the lake plan, wetland assessments will help to confirm the importance of the wetlands on your lake.