Shawnigan Lake landfill faces forfeiture over unpaid taxes

VICTORIA The company that owns a politically charged contaminated soil dump near Shawnigan Lake is within weeks of forfeiting the entire mess to the province due to unpaid taxes.

The Finance Ministry confirmed Tuesday that Cobble Hill Holdings owes $38,106.80 in unpaid taxes dating to 2017, plus penalties and interest. That means the property will be forfeit to the B.C. government on Dec. 1.

Cobble Hill Holdings could try to recover the property within the following three years if it paid the outstanding taxes and penalties.

The forfeiture risk has left critics like Cowichan Valley Green MLA Sonia Furstenau worried provincial taxpayers could be on the hook for remediating the site’s hundreds of thousands of tonnes of contaminated soil and the cost of preventing any future leaks into the nearby Shawnigan Lake watershed.

Capping the site, preventing leaks and monitoring safety are supposed to be the responsibility of Cobble Hill Holdings as a condition of a closure plan that stems from a 2017 government order to shut down the site. The closure plan had a deadline of Oct. 31, but Environment Minister George Heyman this month granted a 10-month extension to Aug. 31, 2020.

The Ministry of Environment said there are six “named parties” on the closure plan that would ultimately be responsible.

Four of the six named parties are owners, directors and businesses connected to Cobble Hill Holdings, which owes the back taxes. Not only are the companies liable, but also the two individually named directors, Michael Kelly and Martin Block, according to the ministry.

The other two named companies are construction and engineering firms that operate the site under a lease: South Island Resource Management and Allterra Construction. They are functionally the same company, according to ministry documents.