Home has cost city $10.5 million
Empty homes tax levied against owner of property with breached aquifer
A $21,100 charge will be added to Feng Lin Liu’s alleged debts if the West Side property owner fails to submit his empty homes tax declaration to the City of Vancouver.
Liu is the owner of 7084 Beechwood St., where engineers are one final test away from completing a $10.5-million project to cap a breached aquifer that gushed water for almost two years at a clip of up to two million litres a day. Geothermal drillers with Geoenergia Projects hired by Liu left the country after they breached the aquifer and the city stepped in to manage the cleanup.
Last week, Geoenergia’s Armando and Tommaso Mascetti failed to appear in court to face several charges under the provincial Water Act related to the incident. Those charges include diverting more water than authorized and failure to control an artesian well.
That was just the latest move in a series of errors that began in September 2015 when the aquifer was breached. Shortly after the accident, city staff estimated cleanup costs could rack up a $200,000 tab. By the time contractors capped the breach in July 2017, the bill was more than 50 times that figure.
As Vancouver’s Deputy City Manager Paul Mochrie told Postmedia, there was almost no data on underground conditions in the area, and it turned out that the aquifer was under high pressure. Capping the breach was “a very, very complex process that was far more complicated than the engineers had anticipated,” he said.
The Beechwood lot, which now looks like any other construction zone might, save for the hydrant-looking structures dotted around the lot, recently was assessed at $2.7 million. One last test of the seal on the aquifer is slated to take place this summer, and if the closure is deemed successful, it should be possible to build a single-family home on the lot, Mochrie said.
“It may not be possible, for example, to excavate a basement, but it could be a slabon-grade home,” Mochrie said.
Late last year, Vancouver filed a civil claim against Liu in a bid to recoup nearly $6.5 million in costs, plus interest, for the work, according to court filings. And it previously said $4 million in taxes were owed for the property, which could trigger a tax sale of the lot, according to a statement from the city. The city also hit Liu with $21,955 in empty homes taxes in 2017, staff say.
If the property is put up for a tax sale, and if the offers that come in are not sufficient to cover the outstanding $4-million tax bill, the city could become its new owner, Mochrie said.
After the drilling accident, Liu stopped paying his mortgage on the property, according to 2017 court filings. He was later found to have defaulted on the mortgage in a B.C. Supreme Court ruling and he was ordered to pay more than $1.7 million to CIBC to redeem the property.
There are also liens and certificates of pending litigation against the lot, by Fyfe Well and Water Services, B.C. Groundwater Consulting Services and Provision Land Surveying.
Mortgage documents for the Beechwood property say that Liu is a businessman, and they list his home address as a $4.5-million, 2600-block Edgar Crescent home. During a 2016 visit by Postmedia to that property, an occupant inside the home indicated he did not recognize Liu’s name.
After the breach, there were fears it could develop into a sinkhole that would threaten nearly a dozen nearby multi-million-dollar homes.