MOOREFIELD – Council passed a bylaw to sign off on the sale of a surplus stretch of road along Concession 8, east of Moorefield, at its Feb. 20 meeting.
In 2004, property owners in the area known as Hustonville asked to purchase road allowances from 8270 to 8312 on Concession 8.
According to a report prepared for council by clerk Barb Schellenberger, “the road allowances have not been developed to municipal standards and are not streets for the travelling public.”
The requests and paid deposit agreements then sat dormant until last fall.
At that time the township solicitor “attended a community meeting with staff and property owners outlining the steps to transfer the lands,” the report read.
CAO Manny Baron told council the homeowners have since met with some staff to work on reviving the requests.
“We’ve met with each and every one of those landowners,” Baron said.
“In fact, it was a collaborative effort where we all sat down around a map with the homeowners and kind of discussed what piece and what path we would want to take and all signed off on it.”
Though the requests were made well before his time with the municipality, and Baron said municipal staff appeared to have been aware of them, he could not suggest why it had taken so long to move the requests forward.
“…I remember probably two or three months ago after I started that it was a file left on my desk from the previous administration and we just kind of revived it and got it back and now there is finally closure to it,” he said.
“It was just a matter of just maybe not enough time, I don’t know, I can’t speak to it.”
Councillor Paul Douglas then asked how much the township was selling the road allowances for.
“In terms of appraisal of the valuation, like how did we come up with the price that we are selling this land for?” Douglas asked.
No monetary value
“According to our policy we don’t; we don’t sell it, we split it up,” Baron said.
“We will gain a little bit more tax from it, we don’t own it anymore so we take their deposit we disperse those deposits amongst legal and anything else that we need to do but we don’t ask for a monetary value for that, those pieces of property.”
