Meaford Council (Image from Meaford YouTube)
Meaford is holding off on looking at purchasing Centreville Beach.
Council defeated a motion from Deputy Mayor Shirley Keaveney during a meeting on Monday which proposed directing staff to investigate and allocate an additional $5,000 to look at options for Meaford to purchase the beach.
The beach is currently not a public beach and is not municipally owned. The motion from Keaveney says a group of concerned residents wishes to continue using the beach for public purposes.
This comes after the municipality spent about $7,000 in 2020 to get a legal opinion to see who owns the property. The legal council was not able to confirm who owns the beach.
Keaveney says there is currently a private dispute over ownership of the property.
Coun. Rob Uhrig says while he is not opposed to potentially purchasing the property at a future date, the municipality still needs to identify who owns the beach.
“I definitely wanted to spend the funds to find the legal advise regarding who actually has ownership, but I am a little concerned right now about spending more money looking into purchasing the land until we know who the ownership is and what they might want to do with it,” says Uhrig.
Uhrig asked if the municipality should even spend the $5,000 to look at options to purchase the beach.
“If it comes to a decision that one of the participants does not even want to sell the property to us, we would have spent $5,000 to find out that it wasn’t for sale,” says Uhrig.
Coun. Brandon Forder adds he believes the municipality should not spend any money on this right now.
“The municipality can’t get involved in buying the property until the ownership is fully settled. If the two parties believe they own the same lot of property, this dispute is typically resolved through the civil court system and they can even be heard at the Superior Court of Justice, which has jurisdiction over property and land ownership disputes. In my opinion, those parties need to sort that out, there needs to be a ruling through the civil court system. Once that ruling is made, then if that property owner is interested in having conversations with the municipality about the potential for acquiring that property for public use, then yes we should explore it at that time,” says Forder.
Keaveney’s original motion was defeated.
