North Frontenac council will be asked on Friday, October 2, to sell three more strips of public road allowance at Mississagagon Lake to the owners next door, and a fourth strip inland. The staff report says "an appraisal of the property is not necessary as this is a Road Allowance." That line comes straight from the township's own rule, and under it the public shoreline North Frontenac sells never gets valued.
The township's Policy for Sale and Disposition of Land tells the Clerk to "obtain at least one (1) appraisal of the fair market value of the land." Right below that, it exempts road allowances sold to the neighbouring landowner. Under the same policy, the owner next door is the only person allowed to buy. So there's no set of facts, none, under which a shore road allowance here gets appraised.
The exemption is eleven years old. In 2023 the township pruned the list of land that can skip an appraisal, and kept this clause. Council adopted it for the fourth time this April. All of this is legal. The Municipal Act asks only that a township adopt and keep a policy on selling land.
There's a fair argument on the township's side. A shore road allowance, once closed, is a sixty-six foot ribbon with no access of its own. It can't be built on, and it has to merge into the lot beside it. Those are good reasons not to run a conventional market appraisal on every strip.
And council does say no. In March it refused to hand over a shore road allowance in a road transfer, and told the owners they could apply to buy it. That's a council insisting the public gets paid.
What the township charges is a rate: $0.55 a square foot. Here's what that means at your dock. By my arithmetic, the strip in front of a hundred feet of shoreline comes to $3,630 before the application fee.
Council asked for a review of those charges in 2022, to its credit. In February 2023 a staff report showed council what other municipalities charge. Council adopted $0.55. That's Algonquin Highlands' number, to the cent. The same report listed three municipalities that work out what the land is worth instead, among them Central Frontenac, across our southern line. Nothing in the report says what North Frontenac shoreline is worth. The rate hasn't moved, and nothing in the record since shows a councillor questioning it.
A road allowance nowhere near water costs the same per square foot as Kashwakamak Lake frontage. The older fee schedules priced inland strips by length. Now North Frontenac prices a strip of lakefront and a strip of landlocked bush identically.
On notice, the record runs the wrong way. An inland sale gets an ad in the Frontenac News. A shore sale gets no newspaper ad, just the township website, the applicant's signs and letters to the immediate neighbours. So the most valuable land, owned by the people least likely to be here, is the land left out of the only notice a distant owner would ever see.
Friday's meeting is public, and so is its agenda. More is coming. On September 11 council approved in principle a shore road allowance at Buckshot Lake, and in August three more, on Mazinaw, Kashwakamak and Grindstone.
In six years of by-laws and staff reports, the township has never stated the area of a single parcel. A council voting to sell public waterfront is never told how much of it there is.