One landowner's plight to keep multiple residential rentals on a farm has been denied.
The experimental farm on Highway 16 between Telkwa and Smithers is in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR). It is also currently home to many people.
One of the owners of the land, Jeremy Penninga recently asked the Agricultural Land Commission to reconsider a decision it made last year to disallow the use of several houses as rentals because they are not being used for farm use. The board kept its ruling.
Penninga asked for an extension in February because he was working with the Regional District of Bulkley Nechako to submit an exclusion application. He requested a two-year extension from the original deadline of February 27, 2025 until February 27, 2027, which he believed would allow the current tenants to stay until the exclusion application process is completed.
The request for reconsideration also included letters from the tenants addressing their difficulty finding legal accommodations and noted the current deadline would mean moving in the winter for those who have not found accommodations by then.
However, the panel reviewing the request found that varying the deferred enforcement date based on a potential exclusion application would be premature, and that the commission cannot reasonably be expected to continue to defer enforcement based on the potential submission of an application and its outcome.
However, the panel did allow a short extension until August 30, 2025 to provide those tenants affected by the decision additional time to find accommodations and to move in the summertime.
The panel also advised the commission it should not consider any additional reconsideration requests.
Not all the buildings on the land will be vacated, though. Buildings 2, 11, 12, and 15 on Property 1 were established prior to December 21, 1972 and can remain as a pre-existing, non-conforming use.
However, buildings 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, and 14 on Property 1, and Building 1 on Property 2 are not necessary for farm use, and therefore were refused.
Meanwhile, according to RDBN CAO Curtis Helgesen, Penninga is working with the RDBN to find a path forward to legalize the dwellings on the property.
The RDBN Board has approved third reading of an Official Community Plan amendment and rezoning, and the regional district is preparing to formally ask the Agricultural Land Commission to exclude the property from the Agricultural Land Reserve.
"Should the ALC support this exclusion application the RDBN will consider completing the rezoning process once the applicant has confirmed which dwellings will retroactively receive a building permit," Helgesen added.
Director Stoney Stoltenberg for Area (A) Smithers/Telkwa Rural said they want to move forward with the process because of the lack of housing in the area and he feels for the renters that would be evicted.
"I don't have a lot of sympathy for Jeremy, because he knew what he was doing when he went into this," he said. "But by the same token, he's got a whole bunch of renters out there.
"So in making Jeremy, make all those people vacate, where are we going to put them? We don't have anywhere to put them. All those people that live there, that rent from Jeremy, we don't subsidize a single nickel of that. But the ALC, they don't care. They're trying to preserve agricultural land.
"And why they're trying to preserve it so hard up here in the North, when they just give it up, right and left, down in the Lower Mainland, the best agricultural land in the province. I don't know. I'm at a loss for words as to why things happen the way they do."
