KEARNEY — A hearing into whether or not Kearney’s St. Patrick’s church should be designated as a historical building — scheduled to have taken place yesterday — was cancelled.
That’s because it was determined last-minute that the century-old church was already designated as a heritage building.
A bylaw passed in the 1980s designating the church has been discovered, rendering the year-long process Kearney council has embarked on to designate the church — a process the parish priest and diocese objected to — redundant.
“It was finally discovered that the bylaw was already in place and had been for 20 years,” said Daniel Gariepy, the acting administrative clerk of the province’s conservation review board (CRB). The CRB, a board operating under the Ministry of Culture, oversees hearings into whether a building should be designated when a municipality receives objections after announcing their intent to do so. Buildings can only be designated by municipal bylaws.
The Almaguin News was not able to contact Kearney mayor Jeff Johnston for comment on how the newly uncovered bylaw was discovered and why it had been previously overlooked.
One of three parties that objected to Kearney’s notice that they were going to pass a bylaw designating the building last year is former town clerk Elwood Varty.
He said that the town’s solicitor determined a bylaw, passed in 1986, met all the requirements to impose heritage designation on the building. The lawyer discovered this while researching for the cancelled hearing.
The bylaw is registered on the building’s title, Varty said. Also registered was a schedule of the building’s historical attributes.
Varty said the situation has “resulted in this marvelous old building being the centre of misinformation, a process that has lacked transparency and a fumbling Kearney council…This shameful performance has needlessly consumed effort and time while delaying preservation efforts. It has caused the town and others to spend money unnecessarily. The people of Kearney have been treated to an unnecessary flummox.”
The two other objectors — the parish priest and the Diocese of Peterborough — did so on the basis that a heritage designation could bring unwanted financial burden to the church.
A call to the parish was unreturned, and the vicar in Peterborough is unavailable until later this week.
All parties were expected at the cancelled hearing, where Kearney would have made a case for a designation, and the objectors would have made their cases against it.
The CRB would have issued a recommendation, but in the end, it would have been up to Kearney council to decide whether to proceed with the designation.
A historical building designation, according to the Ministry of Culture, promotes awareness of the property’s heritage value and ensures that changes to the property are properly managed. It also prevents demolition.
Editorial
