ION - Waterloo Region's Light Rail Transit

[ijmorlan]

...I was inferring based on your statement. Did I misunderstand?

Yes.  I don't speak legaleeze!  I read 3 words and got confused.    I thought you were making a statement saying exactly what happened.

So, who knows what happened and can translate this?

No special knowledge here, but I’ve read my share of legal documents and I’ll try to unpack it a little. Overall, it’s a staff recommendation, which Council can vote on. If they vote to follow the recommendation, then staff will do what they recommended. Of course, Council could pass no motion, in which case nothing happens, or they could pass a different motion (e.g. “come up with more options”, “Look into buying the whole property”, etc.).

The recommendation is to expropriate some property. The rest consists of details and standard boilerplate:

1) detailed description of what is to be expropriated, starting with the heading “Permanent Easement” on Page 46;

2) boilerplate starting with “And that staff be instructed to register a Plan of Expropriation for the property…” on Page 48;

3) background information starting with “Summary” on Page 49;

4) maps on Pages 52-54 with areas labelled in correspondence with the detailed description of the property;

5) list of affected owners on Page 55.

So it’s not actually very complicated, there are just a lot of details that are written out in full every time. In this case, since they appear to be expropriating an easement (right to use the property) of a portion of the property rather than full ownership of the entire property, it’s actually longer and more complicated. If they recommend expropriation of an entire property, the detailed description says something more like “all right and title in …” and then specifies the exact property by street address and legal description. Here, it describes the property and gives an extensive description of what the easement is for, which is so long that one loses the thread of the sentence before reaching the end. And then this is done 3 times, because they have separate easements for grading, construction, and permanent operation. Note on the maps that one of the construction easements sort of wraps around the permanent easement, which makes sense: typically the area occupied by construction activities is larger than the area occupied by the finished project.

Overall, my assessment is that they are expropriating an easement allowing them to install and operate crossing gates on Scherer’s property, and complete the related grading and construction activities.

I hope this is helpful. I would love to have an actual lawyer’s assessment of the accuracy of the above. I am not a lawyer and certainly not your lawyer so take it all with a grain of salt.