Liverpool man fights for region to honour decades-old agreement
Arthur Roy says he wants the Region of Queens to honour an agreement his father signed in 1947. (Rick Conrad)
A Liverpool man says he wants the Region of Queens to honour an agreement the municipality made with his father 78 years ago.
Arthur Roy’s father Lincoln signed a deal with the old Town of Liverpool for $1 in 1947 “to dig and excavate an open trench and construct a covered flag drain 115 feet in length” over his land off Wolfe Street. The town wanted to use it as a stormwater drain.
The agreement allowed the municipality to access the land to build the drain and “do other necessary work for the purposes of renewing, repairing, improving or altering the said open trench and said covered flag drain … provided that the area … is left in a good and safe condition.”
Click the image to read the original 1947 agreement (Courtesy Arthur Roy)
Roy, who now owns the land, says the problem is that the town never finished the work properly in the first place. And he’s been fighting to get the municipality to come back and make it right.
“And now the trench has got silt into it and it’s grew up with grass and it’s just a mess,” he said in an interview.
“Either the easement agreement is good or not, right? If it’s good, come and do what it says on the easement agreement. If it’s no good, come and fill it in. They had all these years, 70-some years, running that water down there and not done anything.”
Councillors discussed the issue at a recent closed-door, in-camera meeting.
Mayor Scott Christian told QCCR that the region is willing to replace a crumbling four-foot culvert on Roy’s property.
“We’re going to put a modern culvert in. It’s changed in terms of the standard and the approach to dealing with trenches and ditching. I think in ’47, they wouldn’t have had the same materials available to them, so we’re going to put in a culvert using today’s technologies and today’s approach to handling that, putting in an appropriate culvert given our requirement for access back there. ”
The drainage ditch cuts through Roy’s land. He says he can’t easily access his 10 acres of land, which he uses as pasture for his sheep. He’s had to build a small walkway over the ditch to get there.
“And you can’t take a vehicle over it, so here I have a piece of land that’s cut into where I live … and I can’t access it. I have wood over there cut in the pasture. I can’t get anything to go over because it’s not safe to go over.”
Christian says the drain on Roy’s land is part of a network of stormwater drains and trenches.
“The trench that goes on his land is a small part of a huge network of stormwater trenches that exist. … We need to make sure that culvert is safe. It’s currently unsafe and we need to make sure that that’s a safe passageway across that trench.”
In 2021, Roy contacted his local councillor at the time and former mayor Darlene Norman.
In a letter to Roy, then-CAO Chris McNeill said the municipality would replace the culvert but that Roy would be responsible for its maintenance because the region had no record of installing the culvert in the first place.
“But if they had 115 feet of flagstone, you wouldn’t need a culvert, you could get across that land 115 feet.”
The region’s CAO Willa Thorpe contacted Roy last week after councillors discussed it. She told him the region’s plan to replace the culvert.
Roy hasn’t seen anything in writing yet. And he’s waiting to meet with his lawyer this week before deciding what to do.
“I don’t want a culvert,” he says. “(The agreement) doesn’t call for a culvert. All I want them (to do) is to follow the easement agreement.”
Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com
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