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Eva Lake owners to spend $1.2 million to fix sinking buildings

Legal mediation fails but negotiations still ongoing; some owners will be forced to sell

After a failed mediation meeting in mid-June, the owners of two sinking apartment buildings at Eva Lake Village are set to begin repairs on their buildings before the coming winter.

It will cost approximately $1.2 million to lift two multiple-unit apartment buildings, put a latticework of steel underneath them and then place the buildings down again. And the owners will have to foot the entire bill despite the ongoing legal action against the builder, the municipality, two engineering companies and a structural engineer.

Those defendants and the representatives of the owners met for an all-day meeting on June 17 in Vancouver where the representatives of the owners rejected an offer from the defendants.

"At the time of the mediation an offer was put forward, which is the normal course of events," said Barry Burko, owner of Summit Strata Management, the company representing the owners. "It was a low offer."

"The two parties were too far apart to come to any resolution on that day," added Burko.

Lawyers for the municipality did not return phone calls as of press time on Wednesday.

The condo owners are now scheduling a special general meeting on Monday, July 11 where they will talk about what happened at the mediation.

In the meantime they are hiring a construction manager and new engineers are drafting up the specifications for repairs. They aim to begin the work within a month and a half.

Burko explained the owners were stuck between a rock and a hard place when faced with the decision to begin repairs now or wait for the legal fallout.

Fearing their engineers would advise the municipality that the buildings would not last another winter, which could trigger an investigation and see the RMOW label the buildings as uninhabitable, the owners decided to push forward with repairs despite the cost. They also had to hire a contractor sooner rather than later so the company could schedule the work on the sinking buildings.

"So the owners are faced with this decision, if they don’t go ahead and fix the buildings now they may end up having no buildings to live in come the fall," said Burko. "That was the rock. The hard place is that the contractors need to know whether or not they’re going to schedule work in for Eva Lake."

And so the $1.2 million cost to repair two buildings must be split between 36 Eva Lake owners. That includes owners who don’t own a unit in one of the sinking buildings but are part of the four-building strata corporation.

Each unit comes with different costs, depending on size among other things. Some owners could be paying as much as $50,000, which may just be too much for some owners to bear.

"And what that means is that some of those owners are going to lose their homes because the strata corporation has very little choice," said Burko.

"If four or five or six people don’t pay $50,000 each or whatever that amount is, there simply won’t be enough funds to pay for the repairs in full."

He would not say how many owners specifically cannot afford the repairs at this time. But there are some.

"There are some owners that can’t make those payments and we’re waiting for direction from the owners on what to do with those owners and our choices are (to) start foreclosure proceedings and all that nasty stuff," said Burko.

He calls it a tragic situation, one where the strata company will have to force the sale of some of the properties, most likely at a lower than normal price because the integrity of the building has been called into question.

"And so the strata corporation is really in a very unenviable position of having to try to collect that money."

Court proceedings were launched in April 2004 against the engineering companies, Jacques Whitford and Snow Country Consultants and structural engineer Jonathan Paine, as well as the RMOW.

At the end of March 2005 Snow Country Consultants and engineer Jonathan Paine added local builder Rod Nadeau to the lawsuit.

The owners argue, according to the Writ of Summons from April 2004, that the employee housing buildings were developed on fill in 1988. As a result they have been sinking.

That means some residents can’t open their windows and doors properly and their floor tiles are cracking, among other things. Some of the $1.2 million will go towards those indoor repairs but it most likely won’t cover everything.

Despite the decision to forge ahead with the repairs, negotiations will continue with the owners and the defendants in the lawsuit.

In the meantime, Burko is appealing to the municipality and the Whistler Housing Authority to come to the aid of the condo owners in dire straits to see if they can help in any way.

"For all those people that fall into this category, into this boat, they’re calling on the municipality, the WHA, to come to their rescue, come to their aid, in the form of any way that’s possible, whether it’s bridge financing, whether it’s compensation, whether it’s anything else, because clearly there is going to be incredible hardship on these people."