Mara Lake.

Image Credit: @mattymoore79 via Twitter

A group of Shuswap residents has raised $120,000 and hired an international law firm following a dispute about dock access on Mara Lake.

Calling itself the B.C. Dock Owners Coalition, the group formed several months ago and quickly raised $120,000 – receiving multiple donations in the thousands of dollars.

While the six-figured fundraising effort is impressive, surprisingly the issue at hand only appears to affect a couple of dozen households.

B.C. Dock Owners Coalition is opposed to what it sees as "draconian" actions by the Columbia Shuswap Regional District regarding dock access for roughly 22 homes near Mara Lake.

The residents, known as upland owners, own property adjacent to the Shuswap-North Okanagan Rail Trail, but not on the waterfront, and have for years had crossing agreements with CP rail allowing them access to their private docks on the lake.

Now that the CP rail line has become the property of Columbia Shuswap Regional District, Splatsin, and Regional District of the North Okanagan in preparation for it to become the new Sicamous to Armstrong rail trail, the regional district wants the owners to sign new crossing agreements.

But almost two years after the crossing agreement was drafted, the majority of upland owners are yet to sign it.

B.C. Dock Owners Coalition spokesperson Natalie Sorkilmo said upland owners have serious issues with the language in the new agreements.

"There's a lot of draconian clauses in there," Sorkilmo told iNFOnews.ca. "(The) Regional District has the ability to remove a dock with only 90 days notice."

Sorkilmo says the agreements also have a clause allowing the regional district the right to deny the renewal of dock agreements without cause.

“It’s going to have great effects to our community and the economy here, people come here specifically to be able to go boating and because it is a dock community,” she said.

Sorkilmo said the group is 100 per cent in favor of the proposed rail trail but not the new crossing agreements.

The crossing agreements don't transfer when a property is sold, meaning new buyers have no guarantee they'll be allowed to cross the proposed rail trail to access a private dock.

Sorkilmo says this has already affected some housing sales along the lake and has the potential to see prices drop by 50 per cent.

While the measures do appear to strongly favour the regional district and give the homeowners little rights, Columbia Shuswap Regional District Chief Administrative Officer Charles Hamilton said the new agreements are actually a watered-down version from the old CP agreements that were around for decades.

Hamilton said the CP Rail crossing agreement contained a stricter clause that allowed the rail company to terminate the agreement within 30 days notice and with no cause.

Hamilton points out the Regional District has said it will honour the original crossing agreements and has no intention of removing anyone's docks.

And he doesn't see the issue as a strong-arm tactic by the government.

"This is nothing more than an attempt to privatize a private interest in public lands," Hamilton said.

Columbia Shuswap Regional District Board Chair Kevin Flynn denied the 90 days cancellation clause was heavy-handed.

"The agreement is very similar to what's been there for 30 or 40 years," he said. “We haven't said we are removing any of (the docks), we just want signed agreements. The agreement is better than the one they had with CP and yet they want to change it more for their benefit."

The Regional District director said the crossing agreement needed to protect the rights of 136,000 taxpayers who own the land.

"There's a misunderstanding that they own the waterfront. They don't," Flynn said. "We've modelled the crossing agreements after the CP agreements because... railway lines protect their rights well, and we want to protect the rights of our owners which is the taxpayers."

While some of the docks have been around for decades, current provincial policy wouldn't allow the public to build docks that were not on waterfront properties nowadays.

Further south in the region, the Regional District of North Okanagan told iNFOnews.ca it had not provided consent for any docks or crossings in its jurisdiction along the Okanagan Rail Trail. The North Okanagan Regional District also said when it purchased the land from CN there were some crossing agreements in place that typically included a 30-day cancellation clause. These had since expired and not been renewed.

The B.C. Dock Owners Coalition recently wrote a letter to the Columbia Shuswap Regional District, although Flynn said the letter was full of misinformation and unfounded concerns.

When asked how so few people had managed to raise such a large sum of money so quickly, Sorkilmo said that homeowners had to protect their investments.

The B.C. Dock Owners Coalition Gofundme and be found here.

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