By PAUL JANKOWSKI, SUN TIMES STAFF

Updated 3 hours ago

It came as a shock to David Ceksters to find out that South Bruce Peninsula was set to sell what he says is a slice of an 11- acre property his family has owned since 1960.

The family only learned about the pending sale when a neighbour, Lorri Trafelet, told them about an announcement in The Sun Times, Ceksters said Wednesday.

The notice, published Jan. 8, said part Lot 55 on Denny’s Dam Road “is to be conveyed to those individuals as accepted by council in accordance with confidential agreements of purchase and sale” and anyone who wished to comment on the sale could do so at Tuesday night’s town council meeting.

The meeting was told a bylaw allowing for the transaction was being shelved because the offer of purchase had been with-drawn. When Mayor John Close opened the floor for comment, both Ceksters and Trafelet asked why no one in the area was personally notified about the sale.

“There’s only three homes on our road,” said Trafelet, adding neighbouring municipalities “as a courtesy” inform adjacent landowners before trying to sell empty land.

“It came as a great shock to my family, especially my mother, that this property is going to be sold,” Ceksters said Wednesday. “I phoned the chief administrative officer the next day . . . She (Rhonda Cook) informed me they had accepted an offer and the closing date was Feb. 4.”

Ceksters says he objected and called his lawyer because “we’ve owned this property for 50 years.” It’s been fenced all that time and “the town has never objected to it in those 50 years, (our) having a fence that is clearly visible from the road.”

Ceksters called the process “a comedy of errors right from the beginning.

“They didn’t send anybody over here . . . to check the subject property before they listed it. Then the real estate agent comes, looks for the subject property to put the for sale sign on and can’t find it because our fence is there and doesn’t put a for sale sign up. We had no indication at all until that notification in the paper, so we had to get some legal advice.

“We sent a letter objecting to the sale of the land to the town approximately a week ago and we heard nothing until last night, when I went to the council meeting,” he said.

“I can picture some kind of confrontation” if someone, believing they owned the property, came along in the spring and started to remove the barbed wire fence that sur-rounds the land, he said.

Ceksters said he tried to get in touch with someone at the town on Wednesday to find out the municipality’s plans, but hadn’t heard back.

“I’m hoping there’s going to be a good resolution to this because it’s really put a lot of stress on our family.” He said his mother, Gunta, who will soon turn 76, “lost two or three night’s sleep initially after she heard about it.”

The property in question is “a sliver of land . . . more or less pie-shaped” with about 57 feet frontage on Denny’s Dam Rd., he said. A creek runs through it but the rear of the property is something like 28 feet wide. One side is about 110 feet deep, the other about 104 feet. Ceksters said he’d heard the property was offered for $5,000.

Dawn-Renee Jewell, the real estate agent acting for the town, could not be reached Wednesday to confirm that price. Cook was in a council budget meetings and could not be reached for comment.

Cook said Tuesday night that the property became vested in the town in 1987, she assumed for non-payment of taxes. The previous council decided in 2009 it was surplus to town needs and it was subsequently advertised for sale.

A 2010 request for proposals for real estate services, under which Jewell was hired, lists 14 properties “declared surplus to town needs at this time.” It included 66 Denny’s Dam Rd., also described as “Pt Lot 55” in the former Amabel Township. A May 1, 2010, valuation estimated the property’s fair market price at $1,000, the request for proposals says.

Ceksters says his parents bought the 11-acre property, which includes the lot listed for sale, in 1960 and older “zoning maps” show the property as belonging to the family.

“No one objected. For 50 years we haven’t heard anything from the town otherwise,” he said. “I’m just hoping the town does the right thing and settles with us because otherwise no one is a winner in the end and I don’t want to see that happen.”

The “right thing” is for the town to recognize the Ceksters own the property outright or through adverse possession, the legal term for squatters’ rights, he said. “But we’ll see what they do and choose our path when they do make that offer or do whatever they’re going to do.”

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