TAY VALLEY TUSSLE
Robyn Mulcahy and husband Scott Reid have been fighting Tay Valley Township for months over her planned ‘forest school’ outside Perth. A zoning issue has evolved into a legal battle and strange new rules at their local council, Kelly Egan writes.
At Blueberry Creek Forest School and Nature Centre, there are winding paths and drooping willows, hand-built tugboat forts, gardens and shy rabbits, masterful split-rail fences and exotic chickens who will cradle in your arms.
And trouble, the unnatural kind only humans can make.
Blueberry Creek is the brainchild of Robyn Mulcahy, a Perth resident, mother of five and wife of Lanark-area MP Scott Reid
— a not-incidental part of the messy story.
And there is Reid, a boyishlooking 54, holding a dustpan, as silkie chickens scoot around the yard, not clucking loud enough to drown out his indignation.
“What husband would sit there while a bully attacks his wife’s character and threatens to destroy her dream?” he asked, as storm clouds threatened one day this week.
“I have always wanted to be able to say publicly just how profoundly offended I am that (a municipal bureaucrat) would have tried to poison the council’s mind against my wife by making characterizations like that about her.”
Well, then — the battle with Tay Valley Township is full on, isn’t it?
Blueberry Creek, which opened in September 2017, is in a kind of legal limbo while its operators and the township fight over permitted uses under the commercial zoning bylaw.
Mulcahy has extensive training in the educational genre of “forest schools,” in which children learn at their own pace, and engage uninterrupted in a woodland setting, while learning about the seasons, trees, animals and the natural world.
To that end, the couple bought a property just on the southern fringe of Perth: 2.5 acres off Highway 7, including a portion of the creek, an 1850s log house with an addition, and a couple of outbuildings.
They got straight to work. About $100,000 was poured into the house, the septic system was replaced, the split rail fence was added, the chicken coop was cleaned up and then occupied, and an $85,000 plan was developed to raise the little wooden bridge one metre, in case of flooding. There’s lots more, but suffice to say a lot of sweat, tears and cash have poured into the place, including a small apple orchard.
Trouble began last fall when the couple obtained a building permit to replace a mouldy old structure with a bright art studio for the children to use, especially in winter.
By then, the school had been operating for weeks, taking kids on Mondays and Fridays. Enrolment was about 35, ages four to 12, and many of the kids were not typical learners — possibly on the autism spectrum or not wellsuited to traditional classrooms.
(It is a labour of love, too, as Mulcahy draws no salary and says about one-third of the children don’t even pay.)
As the walls of the new building went up and the roof was being worked on, an official from the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority stopped by to inspect. School? What school? This is a floodplain for the creek.
And the township was looped in because the permit was already issued. Oh, oh. The building didn’t match the permit, so a stop-work order was imposed, freezing construction just as the snow was about to fall.
There was a face-to-face meeting in November, then January, to resolve the issue. Mulcahy resubmitted drawings to correct the shortcomings in the building permit, but now regulatory problems were growing: a school was not permitted under the current zoning, the township argued, and what about the floodplain problem?
The couple’s patience was wearing thin. Reid was present at the January meeting and admits he was upset at suggestions Mulcahy had misled the township about the new building and the property’s ultimate purpose. The threat of litigation against them also hung in the air.
It would get worse.
In answer to an inquiry from Coun. Brian Campbell, township chief administrative officer Larry Donaldson wrote a summary of the January meeting with Reid and Mulcahy. (To provide context, this meeting is only weeks after both a sitting councillor and Lanark-area MPP Randy Hillier were found guilty of harassment of township staff, so the “tone” of municipal discussions was very much a live issue.)
“I had to caution the local MP several times during the meeting that he needed to calm down, that I was not prepared to have a discussion under the terms he was setting out, and at one point I indicated the meeting was over after a particularly hostile comment from the M.P.,” Donaldson wrote in March, adding, “If anything, I am understating the situation.”
Donaldson called the couple “aggressive and hostile” and said he was “shocked” at their conduct.
Well, the memo was sent to every councillor, then leaked to the media. Reid — the MP who has Tay Valley in his riding — was insulted and livid. His wife, meanwhile, on the verge of tears in the meeting, was looking at nine months of work possibly going down the drain.
“To be honest,” Mulcahy wrote to supporters, “the past nine months have felt like a very personal attack on my rights as a property owner and a citizen.”
A 1,500-name petition was mounted to support the nature centre.
“I feel very lucky that we’ve been able to fight back and I’m completely overwhelmed by the support of the community,” she says.
So lawyers have got involved — at last count, at least five — while the building sits unfinished and the zoning issue unresolved. It helps to know that Reid, as the son of the Giant Tiger store founder, is independently wealthy, so he has the means to battle this out.
“We are experiencing an extreme version of something that’s been happening over and over again in Tay Valley Township,” Reid said.
“It’s always been the same. ‘You will do what we say or we will punish you with legal action. In the meantime, we give you impossible and pointless hurdles to overcome that will use up your resources and your time.’ ”
In an interview Tuesday, Reeve Keith Kerr defended the township’s actions, saying the building permit was issued “falsely” and that a zoning amendment and site plan agreement are needed to bring the “school” in conformity.
“We dealt with this issue the same as we deal with every other issue.”
We reached out to township CAO Donaldson for comment, but there was no response as of late Wednesday.
Coun. Campbell, meanwhile, who is running for reeve in the upcoming election, thinks the township can do better in terms of public service to taxpayers.
“That’s one of the reasons why I’m running. I think we need a change over there.”
To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@ postmedia.com Twitter.com/ kellyegancolumn