By James Peters

Mamit Lake landowner says dam is fine, but LNIB can’t get to rock on his property

May 7, 2018 | 12:49 PM

MERRITT, B.C. — A Mamit Lake property owner whose land stands between work crews and the Mamit Lake dam says those crews can access the dam anytime they’d like – they just can’t access a cache of rock on his property.

Last Thursday, Lower Nicola Indian Band Chief Aaron Sumexheltza told CFJC Today Gordon Garthwaite was preventing access to the dam for contractors who needed to perform necessary prevention work on the structure.

But Garthwaite says he’s not doing that at all.

“They have a legal right-of-way through our property to get to the dam. They’ve never been refused access to the dam, ever,” said Garthwaite.

However, the landowner says the band had previously dumped a quantity of rock on his property it would now like to use as rip-rap, and he’s not letting them get to that rock.

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Garthwaite says it’s over the band’s support for a moratorium on the spreading of biosolids, something he says he has done on his property for decades.

“We even have letters from the Indian band, back in the 1990s, saying that biosolids are the best thing for the land. Then they put up a roadblock because they were in bed with Friends of the Nicola Valley. We can’t get any biosolids anymore. So I said, ‘If we’re not getting any biosolids then you’re not getting on our property to get that rock,’” said Garthwaite.

“It is their rock, but it’s on my property and we’re having a dispute about it,” added Garthwaite. “They said there was a state of emergency and they were going to phone the RCMP if I didn’t let them on the property. The RCMP did come, and the engineers came, and there is no state of emergency. The dam is just fine. The spillway is just fine.”

“They just don’t want to talk about this biosolids thing, and I said, ‘Okay, then you’re not getting the rock.’ And they don’t need it for the dam.”