The City of Kelowna and Hotel Eldorado have been doing legal jiu-jitsu over the waterfront boardwalk for five years until the city decided this week that expropriation would be the finishing move.

Johannes Saufferer is the director of real estate for the city and he said expropriation was the best, sure-fire way to end the dispute considering the way the hotel has behaved in the past five years.

He said right-of-way laws are complicated and the existing document that gives the public access has gaps for things like pets and smoking, so the hotel could continue to find reasons to block access.

“If somebody wanted to restrict public access and use the limitations that are in the right-of-way document to do so, and they want to be creative, then this could be a never-ending battle,” he said.

The exact dollar figure the city intends to pay the hotel hasn’t been figured out yet and it will be determined by a third party appraiser during the expropriation process.

Expropriation is the process a municipality is allowed to go through to pay a private owner for their land without their consent.

Saufferer said expropriation isn’t something the city does often, nor lightly. Typically expropriation is for necessities like roads and utilities.

“Our preferred approach is to reach an agreeable resolution with property owners. They are rare in our city, expropriations. We recognize the impact on private property rights and wanting to be respectful of that,” he said.

For more than 20 years, the city’s right of way access to the boardwalk has been in place, but the hotel started blocking access during COVID lockdowns. From there both parties have been jumping through legal hoops that have left the public frustrated.

This most recent closure comes from a “need for repairs” but when the city sent work crews, the hotel denied them access. That was around a year ago.

“As a city or a public servant, I don’t enjoy taking calls from people that are wondering why we haven’t done anything after nine months of saying we’d do something. And people rightly want to have access to the waterfront,” he said.

The hotel has repeatedly tried to find ways to get around allowing public access, through the courts as well as straight up defying court orders. Saufferer said this was the best way to resolve the issue permanently rather than something like cutting the locks.

Hotel Eldorado is owned by Argus Properties and Ted Callahan is the president and CEO of Argus. Callahan has a well-documented history of lengthy legal battles, including a decades-long family feud over $300 million in assets.

Saufferer said the hotel hasn’t officially contacted the city about the expropriation.

Hotel Eldorado management declined to comment.