OSOYOOS TIMES-December 9, 2009

By Laurena Weninger – Osoyoos Times

“It’s a daunting task,” said Terry Underwood, from TRUE Consulting. “Our job is to go out and re-acquire the six-metre right-of-way.”
Underwood is working on completing one of the biggest necessary steps for delivering sewer service to the northwest shore of Osoyoos Lake.
Underwood said the plan to install sewer service in the area started to take shape back in 1989.
At that time, there was an old CP Railway bed running from north to south, 30 metres wide and dead flat.
But in the mid-1990s, the rail line was purchased by a group of residents called CPALO. “It was subdivided and added on to all the adjacent properties,” Underwood said.
But because the sewer line was still in the works, a six-metre right-of-way was staked out and kept for the purpose of running the line.
“I’ll never understand why, but that right-of-way was registered with a sunset clause.”
A sunset clause is an agreement with an expiry date.
The date of expiry for the reservation of the rights-of-way was 10 years.
“It’s now 2009 and it now ceases to exist,” Underwood said.
That means ownership of that dead-flat strip of property running through the area intended for sewer service has reverted to each property owner and Underwood needs to get a new agreement from each owner to run the sewer line through his or her land.
“We’re working with people, moving it around,” he said, explaining that in some cases there are structures built over where the former rights-of-way are located.
Members of Underwood’s engineering consulting firm are starting from the south and working their way north, trying to get voluntary agreements to allow the Town to use each property to run the sewer line.
There are more than 30 properties intended for sewer hook-ups in the first phase of the project and owners are being asked to voluntarily give over the rights for the narrow strip of land.
It hasn’t been easy.
“There’s challenges,” Underwood said. “We’ll work through them.”
Osoyoos contractor Bob Knight, who has been involved with trying to extend the Town’s sewer line to the northwest shore for many years, said there was difficulty with some of the negotiations with property owners over rights-of-way agreements.
He said there were some problems getting everyone on board, but with some negotiating it is falling into place.
Agreements-in-principle are all in place for landowners in the section of the first phase, which begins near the Little Brown Church on 87th Street, Knight said, and encompasses the 104th Avenue area.
All rights-of-way will be fully restored to as close to preconstruction condition as possible after the sewer line is installed.
Underwood said it is hoped that tenders for first phase construction will be sent out in the next few weeks.
Construction is slated to start in February or March and Underwood hopes the system will be operational by June, 2010.
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