07-04-2022, 02:27 PM
(07-04-2022, 11:56 AM)KevinL Wrote: So it seems The Mill Club, a private neighbourhood on Doon Valley next to the golf course, at one point paved a connecting trail from the end of one of their private culs-de-sac down to the Walter Bean, and this was presumably for public use. (I've never seen or used it, so not completely sure myself.)
However, recently a fence and locked gate have been installed across it. This reddit poster, not realizing it was private property, got /r/Kitchener riled up over the apparent closure of a 'public' pathway.
The question remains, though, is if there was some kind of arrangement to make this publicly accessible, and if that has lapsed or been violated by this installation. Anyone here know anything on this?
I've gone through this in detail on that reddit post.
Here is a screen cap of a map of the area from the CoK official interactive map with a couple of additions of mine.
The grey path area encircled in green is the actual, public Walter Bean Grand River trail.
The grey path encircled in red on the pale yellow background is the path that he redditor is complaining is fenced off and has "no trespassing" signs.
The pale yellow background is residential-zoned land and as you can see from the property boundaries around it, that means the path they are complaining about is a private path on private land.
The redditor is claiming that the trail head existed before the condos did, but the Walter Bean trail was not announced until 1999 and was not competely finished until 2006 or so. The condo corporation (WSCC #369) was created in 2002, a number of months after construction was started. Before WSCC #369 gained title to that property it would have been owned by one of the two declarants for the condo corp, 1421281 Ontario Ltd and 1357440 Ontario Ltd who likely owned that land for several years before construction started given how condos need to have a minimum percentage of ownership before construction starts.