Copper Sands trailer park ensnared in debt battle

In 2014, Jaimey Midtdal took over the Copper Sands Mobile Home Park and laid the foundations for an ambitious plan.

She would expand the park, located just north of White City. She would plant 100,000 willow trees to create an environmentally friendly, state-of-the-art wastewater treatment system and channel recycled water back to residents.

Four years later, the willows are in the ground. But the plan has gotten stuck in the mud.

Last November, Midtdal informed a court that her companies had become insolvent and were unable to make payments on millions in debt — more than $10.7 million, according to a credit monitor report. Her companies, including the one that owns Copper Sands, have spent the past seven and a half months under creditor protection, with lenders fighting her all the way to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal.

The appeals court put the brakes on a financing plan Midtdal wrote that she needed to finish work on the wastewater facility, which she insists is nearly complete. The ruling came after creditors cast doubt on the project, with one arguing it has “no reasonable commercial value.”

Midtdal told the Leader-Post her legal travails will have “no negative impact” on the roughly 240 tenants of the mobile home park. However, she spoke of “some pretty ugly things that are happening at the moment.” She later wrote in an email response that the debt figure is based on lender estimates and has since been reduced. The park, she insisted, is at no risk of foreclosure.

Affidavits filed with the court reveal an acrimonious battle between Midtdal and some of her creditors. She wrote that two companies were pursuing a “loan to own” scheme to take over the park.

Midtdal also blamed the Rural Municipality of Edenwold for delaying her expansion plan.

She first came to the RM in 2015, asking to rezone a 20-acre parcel next to the existing park. After 18 months of wrangling, the RM denied her application.

It rejected a further attempt she made to secure a development permit. After a series of appeals, a provincial board finally ruled in the RM’s favour this March, dealing another blow to her efforts. SEE DEBT ON A6

She wrote that the dispute with the RM has caused “considerable financial hardship.”

While that process played out, Midtdal took out a series of loans against her lands. At least one was related to the expansion, while another was meant to fund the accompanying wastewater facility she hoped would service it.

She boasted that the facility would be the first of its kind in Canada, replacing the existing sewage lagoon with a pond, filters and waste-absorbing willows. Water would irrigate the willows and cycle through a treatment system before returning to residents in a form safe enough to use for toilets and yard work. She argued that it would eliminate the need to discharge wastewater into nearby rivers.

But as her projects hit obstacles, lenders began to circle. This past October, Affinity moved to foreclose on the Copper Sands property. Midtdal filed for creditor protection a month later.

She managed to repay Affinity roughly $4.2 million earlier this year, after selling a plot of land in Emerald Park. But her relations with two other major creditors have proven far more strained.

Industrial Properties Regina Limited lent her a sum that grew to reach $4 million, according to the credit monitor Deloitte. But she now disagrees with its owner, David Barber, over what they contracted to. In their affidavits, both sides suggest that documents may have been falsified.

In her affidavit, Midtdal claims they signed an agreement to convert most of the outstanding debt to shares in her companies. In his, Barber insists he was completely unaware of that deal. Although Midtdal produced a document that “purports” to bear his name, he wrote that his signature “appears grainy and pixelated.”

“She had access to my electronic signature,” he alleged of Midtdal.

Midtdal made a similar claim about a document that apparently turned up on the floor of her lawyer’s office, seeming to waive the same alleged agreement.

“I did not sign the subject pages and I dispute the authenticity of the signature,” she wrote in a December affidavit, noting that her digital signatures have been copied on other occasions. The document, she wrote, appears “suspicious.”

She also levelled allegations in her affidavits against a numbered company, run in part by Barber’s brother, that lent $2.5 million to fund her wastewater facility. She wrote that both Barber companies are pursuing an “extremely disturbing strategy” to thwart her plans.

She wrote that they appear to be trying to cause her businesses to fail in a bid to take over her assets, particularly the wastewater facility.

Barber denies that. He wrote that he has simply lost all confidence in Midtdal and her ability to run her businesses. That goes, above all, for the willow operation.

“The economic case for the facility is not apparent to me,” he wrote. “I am concerned that it is based in large part on forcing the existing tenants of Copper Sands to hook up to the water treatment utility at considerable cost to them individually.”

Midtdal’s debts have weighed heavily on the mobile home park. Copper Sands Land Corp brought in just short of $500,000 in rental income in 2016 but posted a $72,000 loss. Interest payments ate up $317,000 of the park’s earnings that year. That followed similar losses in 2015 after even higher interest charges.

Meanwhile, rent at the park rose from $525 to $675 in January, following several years of similar increases.

In court filings earlier this month, Midtdal said that her companies are still trying to come to an agreement with their lenders and are “engaged in an ongoing dialogue.”

They remain under creditor protection.