B.C. residents take on ranchers over access to fishing lake
A range war of sorts has broken out in the British Columbia Interior over public access to Crown property on Canada’s largest working cattle ranch. The fight is setting small-town residents against E. Stanley Kroenke, an American with a net worth of $2.9-billion, whose Douglas Lake Cattle Co. runs 20,000 head of cattle on more than 500,000 acres of sweeping grasslands and pine forests near Merritt, 300 kilometres east of Vancouver.
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Ed Hendricks, owner of Ponderosa Sports, which sells hunting and fishing tackle in Merritt, recently had an e-mail exchange with Sherry Eland, district manager with the Transportation Ministry, in which he complained about public roads being blocked on the ranch. But he was told the road to Minnie Lake is not part of the provincial highway system, because it was never formally dedicated.
But Mr. Hendricks says if it wasn’t a public road, it wouldn’t have a highways department number. And he points out that government graders have worked on the road in the past. Section 42 of the B.C. Transportation Act states: “If public money is spent on a travelled road that is not a highway, the travelled road is deemed and declared to be a highway.”
theglobeandmail.com
Jim |
