May 13, 2019 Letter to Council re TVT and RVCA zoning compliance

May 13, 2019

Dear TVT Councillors, 

As I understand it, you are already aware that Robyn and I will not be attending the May 14^th meeting of Township Council. As you will have read in the email that I sent to Reeve Campbell on May 2 and that he later forwarded to you, it is now eight months since I made a full presentation of the case that Blueberry Creek is fully compliant with the current zoning for the land.

Since we presented our full case on September 18, 2018---and since our case that we are obeying the law is ironclad---we will have nothing further to add until Council has responded to that presentation (which is linked HERE)

Therefore, I have a request for you:

Please EMERGE FROM THIS MEETING WITH A CLEAR INSTRUCTION TO us as to whether it is Council’s position that:

1. Blueberry Creek Nature Centre is fully compliant with Tay Valley Township’s zoning for the property on which it is located; or

2. Blueberry Creek Nature Centre is not fully compliant with the zoning. And if not, please specify how, in your view, the Nature Centre  is not compliant.

Until we get a concrete answer to this question, every other communication between us and you is a complete waste of time.

For example, until we know that the Township regards our Nature Centre as being compliant with the zoning law, we can’t get:

• a township building permit for a bridge built over Blueberry Creek; or

• township approval severed a lot or get a lot-line adjustment, which would be essential to allow above-the-floodline road access from Highway 7.

RVCA tells us that one or the other of these two measures is required in order to make us compliant with their rules. So your refusal to clarify the legal situation vis-à-vis the zoning for the land means that we can’t bring the Nature Centre into compliance with RVCA rules.

Additionally, the studio that we started constructing in 2017 (which would have been finished by the time the snow fell, had it not been for your Stop Work Order) has by now suffered considerable weather damage. I am told that it will not survive another year in a semi-completed state. So if the Township can’t bring itself to answer the question at the top of this page soon enough to allow us to complete construction in 2019, the best solution for us might be to dismantle it, and sue you for the costs of construction and demolition.

What follows is a year-long history of the Township’s failure to respond to our request that Township Council clarify whether or not Blueberry Creek conforms to the township’s zoning bylaw.

By a curious coincidence, your meeting will take place on the one-year anniversary of the date on which Council, via a letter from its solicitor, Tony Fleming, outlined its case that Blueberry Creek was non-compliant with the zoning bylaw.

We read Mr. Fleming’s May 14, 2018 letter and immediately adjusted our behaviour accordingly, dropping the word “school” from Blueberry Creek’s legal name, and incorporating as a federally-registered not-for-profit. Our solicitor wrote back to Mr. Fleming on June 5, indicting that we had brought ourselves into compliance. He specifically requested that Mr. Fleming take these facts to Council and see if, in Council’s opinion, we would now be regarded as being in compliance with the zoning for the land.

We never received a reply to this letter, which makes me wonder whether Mr. Fleming neglected to show the June 5 letter to Council and to offer his advice as to whether or not we were now in conformity with the zoning for the land.

We were initially hopeful, when Mr Fleming proposed, via a June 12 telephone call to our lawyer, to negotiate a Site Plan Agreement. We agreed, but were shocked when, on July 12, we were sent a proposed wording which would have forced us to surrender so many of the currently-lawful uses of the property that it would have lost most of its resale value. Additionally, the proposed agreement would have caused us to lose Township emergency services, and to pay the Township’s legal costs for negotiating the agreement.

Moreover, Mr. Fleming accompanied the proposed agreement with the threat that failure to engage in such negotiations would trigger litigation: “While we are working through this I will hold any court application in abeyance.”

So, with this pistol at our heads, we reluctantly decided not to ask Mr. Fleming why we had not heard a response to our June 5 letter, and we entered very reluctantly into Site Plan Agreement negotiations.

But we also decided that even if Mr. Fleming was unwilling to present our case to Council, he could not prevent us from doing so ourselves.

So on July 14, 2018 I sent a letter to Amanda Mabo, requesting that we be allowed to appear before Council to demonstrate (as I put it in the letter)  "that our current operations conform fully to the uses permitted under the existing zoning for the property." I was finally able to present my arguments at an open Council meeting on September 18, 2018. 

The September 18 presentation is our demonstration that we are fully compliant, in all respects, with the zoning for the land. We anticipated that we would, via Mr. Fleming, receive some kind of response from Council, indicating either that they had been won over by our presentation, or that they had specific concerns.

What we received instead was absolute silence on the issue of whether we conform to the law. But we did get further threats of litigation. Here is what Mr. Fleming wrote to us on October 2:

In order to avoid litigation, I require:

1. confirmation that your clients are prepared to resolve the site plan on the basis substantially as originally drafted (meaning the additional items listed in your letter [such as getting new, above-the-floodline road access, which had been suggested to us by RVCA at a meeting in September] will not form part of the agreement; and

2. a commitment to work to resolve these issues expeditiously, with a goal to have an agreed-upon draft by October 5.

If these terms are not acceptable please advise if you will accept service [of a notice that TVT is litigating to shut down Blueberry Creek] on behalf of your clients.

Mr. Fleming’s constant use of the threat of litigation is only one of a series of actions, taken by your senior staff and legal counsel, that have turned our attempt to operate a nature centre into an unending nightmare. We have been treated like criminals, no matter how hard we try to obey every single law. We have been:

• falsely accused, by CAO Larry Donaldson of lying on the building application for the children’s art studio and of acting, in a “shocking,” “hostile” and “aggressive” manner in a meeting with him;

• subjected to an attempt to rewrite the definition of “School” in the zoning bylaw which would have caused our lawful use of the land to become unlawful;

• denied access, for over a year, to literally hundreds of pages of records about us, that would, if made available to us, allow us to properly demonstrate that our use of the land is lawful, and that senior staff (and in particular, Mr. Donaldson) knew this from the start.

Now it is Council’s turn to finally take a leadership role. Council must give Mr. Fleming a clear instruction. You must tell him to write a letter confirming what Council’s position actually is: Do you still maintain that we are breaking the law, or do you acknowledge that we are fully compliant? Further failures to answer this simple question would be an abdication of your responsibilities.

One final thought: Having been on the receiving end of many letters from Mr Fleming, I am left with the impression that he sometimes adds a bit of text that was not actually authorized by Council. I’d strongly suggest that he be required to submit his final draft for Council’s approval.

We await your response.

Sincerely,

Scott Reid