The Town of Woodstock Council is proposing new By-Law 604, A By-Law Respecting Dangerous or Unsightly Premises. This by-law would replace existing By-Law 288 which is applicable in Ward 4 only, and dates from 2007 and references legislation that has since been replaced. The bylaw is being rewritten to reference the current Local Governance Act (LGA), made to specifically address the amalgamated Town of Woodstock, and has the appeal process corrected.

Note that Section 10 (1) d of the Act gives the Town the authority to enact a bylaw regarding dangerous or unsightly property or premises, and section 128 (2) specifies that such a bylaw shall contain only those provisions in section 130 to 143 of this Act. In essence, the Act specifies the content and structure of our bylaw with limited ability for variance. Given that, our bylaw is written to simply reference the Act and subsequent amendments. The intent is to reference the ACT instead of incorporating the entire text into our bylaw as the Act is amended and/or revised often, and we would struggle to keep ours up to date.

 To compensate, we have created an FAQ document to accompany the bylaw. Updating the FAQ for any changes can be done by staff at any time.