A rural landowner is fighting to keep B.C. Hydro from expropriating her land for a massive conveyor belt that would supply stone for the Site C dam.
Marilyn Shaman, who owns around 140 acres of forested land southwest of Fort St. John on the north bank of the Peace, successfully applied for exclusion from the Agricultural Land Reserve at Thursday's meeting of the Peace River Regional District.
She believes that exclusion from the ALR will help her fend off a B.C. Hydro plan to convert the largely uninhabited land into a staging area for Site C.
Shaman said B.C. Hydro approached her several years ago about a plan to acquire the property for Site C construction.
Hydro wants to smooth out a bend in Old Fort Road, and more significantly, build what Shaman describes as a 50-foot-wide conveyor belt that would transport rock from a quarry northeast of the property.
Site C, which received very tentative approval from a Joint Review Panel earlier this month, is envisioned as an earthfill dam that would greatly enhance B.C. Hydro's power generation capacity. If Hydro gets its way, almost all the stones to build Site C would travel through Shaman鈥檚 property.
She said around 20 hectares of the property are in the ALR. Rather than keeping the land under those restrictions, she wanted it removed to give her a better chance of bargaining with Hydro.
As Area C Director Arthur Hadland explained, converting the land from agricultural designation to residential or industrial would greatly increase its value.
"This does give her some strength in bargaining in with Hydro, because they will roll over her otherwise," he said.
