Owners, customers incensed after Brant County blocks a driveway to farm market

A County of Brant decision to place a concrete barrier across one of two driveways into a popular rural farm market has perplexed its owners and their customers.

Jenny Butcher and Wes Kuntz, owners of the Little Brown Cow on Cockshutt Road, received a notification from the county in December 2022 that one of their driveways would be closed.

“That was a total shock to us,” said Butcher on Thursday. “From the get-go, they’ve been describing the one and only problem as that (north) laneway creating this conflict.”

Earlier in 2022 the county created a left-turn lane into the farm market as part of a road reconstruction project.

“We are grateful for the turning lane because I truly believe that lives were in danger on a very regular basis,” Butcher explained. “The turning lane brought us from five to 10 near accidents every single day, to zero.”

She said the issue is, according to what she calls ‘The Golden Book of Engineering’, that it is unacceptable for customers exiting out of the market to turn left and cross the turning lane.

After many months of discussions, Butcher said they came to understand there was no room for compromise on the part of the county. But the couple wasn’t in the frame of mind to compromise either.

“We need two accesses to this property. We felt that was pretty reasonable.”

Business at the market has grown by 46 per cent from July 2022 to July 2023, thanks in part to funding from the Hamilton Halton Brant Regional Tourism Relief Fund that allowed the couple to pave their parking lot and driveways.

Little Brown Cow receives several tractor-trailer deliveries each week, and some truck drivers have now said they will have to back into the business if presented with only a single driveway because turning around in the busy parking lot would be difficult and unsafe for pedestrians.

The market also has a lot of customers from the Punjabi community – many of them truck drivers who live in the GTA – who stop in to purchase judgments of 5.3 per cent MF milk sourced from the couple’s herd of Jersey cows, to the tune of thousands of liters every day.

Those truckers must now park on the shoulder of the road, creating line-of-sight problems for motorists exiting the market.

The couple came up with a low-cost plan they felt would accommodate both sides and would only require road painting.

“There is engineered, third-party traffic data to show that Little Brown Cow receives eight times the traffic as McGill Road – for left turns – at peak times of the day,” Butcher explained. “The length of the left turn lane for McGill Road is double that for Little Brown Cow.”

The market owner’s proposed solution to lengthen the turn lane and make customers enter only into the north driveway – eliminating exiting market traffic from crossing the turn lane – “was met with a proverbial concrete wall.”

Butcher broadcast a video on Facebook Live of County of Brant workers installing the concrete barriers Wednesday morning that generated more than 7,700 comments, and spawned an online petition that drew over 3,400 signatures by late Thursday afternoon.

“Down (the road) just past the community of Burtch there are still flowers on a telephone pole where someone was killed last year,” said Cockshutt Road resident Ken Stock, who is a frequent customer at the market. “It’s extremely dangerous. There’s a lot of aggressive traffic.”

Stock said he’s frustrated after reaching out to county councilors and the mayor with no response.

County of Brant Mayor David Bailey admitted on his Facebook page Wednesday that “this situation has caused a lot of uproar.”

He said communications with the market owners over several months saw county staff present options that would resolve public safety and customer service concerns.

“The options presented by staff were not accepted, and no additional resolutions were received from the business owners,” said Bailey. “The actions taken by the County of Brant are to address an ongoing public safety issue and potential traffic hazard, which is for the protection and in the interest of all residents. This is now a legal matter between the parties.”

The County of Brant issued a statement Thursday on behalf of CAO Alison Newton.

“The safety hazard is that the two driveways are too close together combined with the left-hand turning lane,” Newton stated. “This creates several turning conflicts on a road with 13,000 to 16,000 vehicles per day traveling at a posted 80 km/hour.”

The statement goes on to say that the left-hand turning lane was requested by Little Brown Cow and the county determined it was warranted.

“It was communicated to the business in advance that this would cause an additional safety issue and would result in the north driveway being removed,” said the statement.

“We knew this was coming for nine months. We were bracing for it. We didn’t want it and tried so hard to avoid it,” Butcher shared. “But at the same time, it was vindictive because now our customers can help us shoulder some of the stress.

“We would just like to go back to milking cows in the morning, selling that milk to wonderful people during the day, and going to sleep at 7 pm every night so we can get up at 4 am every morning.”

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