It appears Lake of Bays Council may have opened a can of worms when it decided to require residents who use unopened road allowance to access their property to acquire liability insurance, enter into a Roads License Agreement with the Township, and, in some instances, make costly improvements to the same.
Last July, Lake of Bays Mayor Terry Glover explained that the initiative had come from staff and was a direct response to skyrocketing insurance premiums across Ontario due to multi-million dollar liability-related court cases. He said the Township pays more than half a million dollars in insurance premiums every year, which is four times higher than in 2015.
“To minimize the assessed risk of liability by insurance providers and keep premiums as low as possible, staff report on measures taken by the Township to mitigate the risk of potential claims. These license agreements are among the measures the Township has implemented in recent years to protect taxpayers against potential claims and the associated rising insurance costs,” noted Lake of Bays Mayor Terry Glover via previous email correspondence with Doppler.
But former Township mayors say unopened road allowances were never an issue during their mandate.
Former Lake of Bays mayor, lawyer, and long-time resident Tom Pinckard questioned what portion of the municipality’s insurance premium is attributable to unopened road allowances. “The question would be if we implement this program to limit our liability… how much would our insurance premium go down?” He said while he has an affinity for the current council, trying to implement a road license agreement program is regressive. He said a legal search did not result in any lawsuits being filed in court in Ontario related to such road allowances and reiterated that they were never a problem during his mandate.
“What is the problem we’re trying to solve here,” he questioned, adding that the municipality should “cease and desist and go back to what they had before, which worked fine.” Up until last year, anyone who wanted to put a road on an opened road allowance had to enter into an agreement with the municipality. Anyone else who crossed an unopened road allowance was able to do so without issue, and people have been doing that for more than a century, he noted. Some cross private property several times. Does that mean you need a license for every instance where they cross the same private property?
Pinckard said the proposed road license agreement does not run with the property but with an individual and is not transferable, which makes it hard to sell a property with no access. The agreement also states that the license can be revoked at any time. “So that’s the nuances of law that are overlayed in here that nobody’s addressed yet. Frankly, I’m a fan of this council, a fan of this mayor, and I think they’ll get it right. I hope to hell they get it right.”
Former Lake of Bays Mayor Bob Young said the numerous unopened road allowances located throughout the municipality were never an issue during his term of council either. He said each circumstance was treated individually. “We dealt with the issues when they came up. We didn’t have, I think, a hard-written policy like the one they put in place. It was fairly simple. If somebody had a real need to use a road allowance (except one going to water) then we worked with them to lease it out,” he recalled.
“This current administration and I don’t know who was in the back of it, whether it was the mayor or the CAO, has been totally driven by liability insurance. If there’s even a whiff, they go into abject panic. My big concern was back at the Dorset Pavilion Park; remember, we lost that because they were so worried about liability. You know insurance is there for a purpose, advisors are there to advise, but we don’t have to kowtow to them,” said Young, adding that the municipality should be focused on how they can help people enjoy their property “and just help them.”
At the August 13 Council meeting, Lake of Bays Councillor Nancy Tapley brought forward a notice of motion to establish a moratorium on the license requirements, noting that the Township did not solicit input from those who would be affected and said it was put in place too quickly and it represented an exorbitant cost for some people.” In the end, council agreed to put a moratorium on the required road license agreements.
A public meeting on the issue was held on September 9, 2024, which packed the council chambers. You can watch it HERE and comments received HERE.
Mayor Glover told Doppler the municipality is working on the issue and reviewing the community’s feedback and concerns. “We’ve got people working on it. There’s no update yet. I mean, it’ll come soon enough, but there’s nothing now,” he explained. The moratorium is set to be concluded on February 11, 2025, but the Mayor hopes to have more information sooner.
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Vito Mariano says
I truly believe this is your typical money grab
It took me 35 years of hard work to have a little place on the water for peace and quiet
This is an unnecessary strong arm tactic and uncalled for
I think we should all stop paying our property taxes till this goes away
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
Really not a fan of this council–in watching the meetings, it’s been clear that the mayor has pushed this RLA initiative through quite forcefully, and that councillors have largely abdicated their responsibilities. Councillor Tapley’s RLA moratorium motion was cut in half (should have been a full year moratorium) due to Mayor’s “not comfortable” –i.e based on his feelings instead of factual knowledge about just how ill thought out the initiative was nor any understanding that what Township is asking for is unattainable (ie insurance that a private citizen can’t buy because the product doesn’t exist, and for us $700,000 worth of township mandated road improvements for a stretch of ~500m of single track dirt road serving some 10 properties at 10 km/h speeds). Mayor Glover’s comments that nobody complained about the RLA to the Township (as recorded in his CBC interview) were untruthful, and there is plenty of evidence to that effect–ask the people who have been threatened by the Township with bulldozers or trespassing fines in response to complaints, and his mischaracterizing professional journalists as hacks being manipulated by social media misinformation from a “fringe group” was frankly offensive and unhelpful. This mayor isn’t listening, Councillors aren’t responding to taxpayers, and the consequences for Lake of Bays will be a drop in property values (my bank manager was very quick to point this out in relation to mortgage renewals) and no doubt lawsuits (as Bob Aaron’s TO Star column predicted). Council and Mayor Glover have failed to repeal the bylaw when its huge flaws have been explained to them, so clearly it is time for a clean sweep in leadership come election time–and if staff are driving this war on the citizen, then they need to move on as well.
Mike Jefford says
The amount of red tape, bureaucracy, government intrusion, productive time lost, stress, confusion, and additional spending that this whole thing has created is insane. Large municipal blanket insurance policies are very efficient at protecting the most residents for cheap. Sticking massive sudden financial burdens on a specific group of residents just to save others a couple of bucks is not how a community works. Maybe time would have been better spent shopping around for different insurance providers or negotiating with the existing one. Previous mayors here provided great insight. I think we should be looking after everyone and providing as many opportunities as possible for people to enjoy their lives.
Why this sort of thing is a focus of council and not things like helping Lake of Bays Brewery- a landmark business in Baysville run by an incredible entrepreneur thrive into the future, or not getting the Dorset Rec Centre open asap for residents (It took 4 years to renovate) is mind boggling to me. Yes I know the rec centre is on one side of the road, but Lake of Bays Residents use it, and the residents are more important than where a boundary line is. Council is also closing so many doors for young people especially. Seems like time for a big priority shift IMO, but I’m just a millennial so what do I know.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
This council needs to follow Tay and Kearney twp and get rid of this bylaw.
If the Land Tribunal accomplished this for them it certainly would for any other township that goes that route.
This whole situation has been so stressful , costly and unnecessary.
The Real Person!
The Real Person!
The Road License Agreement by-law needs to be repealed immediately. We do not need a “rebooted”, modified or tinkered RLA, it needs to be removed. There is no need to delay repeal of the by-law until February 2025, if the mayor is acting in good faith for the taxpayers, just remove it now and stop wasting time and money on this issue.
There is much more important work to be done in the Township, instead of trying to work backwards, making a policy with no factual basis, but then trying to identify an actual issue for the policy to correct. It is telling that a moratorium was put in place, but keeping the by-law intact, allowing the clock to run down on the possibility for a legal challenge, with the purported solution coming after the 1-year timeline to challenge it.
Without a doubt, this policy will stick to the mayor, there is an election in 2026 and this sort of governance will not be forgotten.