Halifax mobile home park under boil-water order loses bid for licence

When Taylor Forrest and her partner first moved into Springfield Estates mobile-home park, the Halifax-area couple was excited to own their first home.

But just months later, in December 2021, the Middle Sackville land-lease community was placed under a boil-water advisory that has remained ever since.

"It's not fair that anybody should be living like that," Forrest said Thursday. "To not even be able to drink our water, like, it's pretty upsetting."

The water issues have meant Springfield Estates has been operating without a licence for the past few years, and have been in a grey area where they still collect rent but the municipality has not — until recently — taken any legal action.

Halifax did charge owner Westphal Court for failing to provide drinking water in a separate matter last year, and that case is coming to court in June.

On Thursday, the park owners came before the city's appeals standing committee to ask their most recent licence denial be overturned. That appeal failed.

Westphal Court's lawyer, Dylan MacDonald of Stewart McKelvey, argued the company is actually following the bylaw requirement to provide drinking water because it delivers a flat of 40 500-millilitre bottles of water to households once a week.

MacDonald confirmed the bottled water delivery started October 2023, soon after the city filed charges. He said the landlords have drilled a well for a new source of water and hopes to bring it online by this summer.

Halifax lawyers said they didn't consider bottled water to be following the bylaw, which also specifically states anywhere that's under a boil-water advisory is considered not to be offering proper water.

But MacDonald said that without a licence, Westphal Court has left itself open to fines or legal action, which leaves it with limited options.

"Springfield may be forced to simply discontinue operations and close, leaving possibly 250 residents unhoused," MacDonald told the committee.

Although MacDonald said the committee should not take this as a threat, and was just laying out one of the outcomes, he later said the stakes are "immensely high."

The new land-lease bylaw that came into effect September 2023 has allowed property owners to appeal a licence denial for the first time. Before this, Springfield was regulated by the Halifax County mobile home park bylaw, and any denial was final.

That old bylaw still required a constant supply of potable water, but Peter Nightingale, manager of licence standards, said Thursday that licences had not been properly issued for years. It is unclear why this happened.

"I'm not aware that the [old] bylaw … was being enforced up until 2022," he said.

Although Nightingale said Springfield was granted an operating permit in 2022 "in error" because staff missed the boil-water advisory, it was revoked that October and they have not held one since.

Before that, Nightingale said he does not know when Springfield last held a legal operating licence.

Forrest said she doesn't know where she would move her home if the park closed, but she doesn't blame the city for enforcing the law.

"Especially if [Westphal] is kind of trying to use that as leverage to continue their business, when this isn't our business — it's our home," Forrest said.

She added something has to change because the bottled water only lasts a few days in their home between herself, her partner, and their pets.

"It's like one pack of water from Costco, which is almost always late," Forrest said. "There's been a couple of weeks where it doesn't show up at all, so we don't really rely on that."

Besides not being able to drink the water, Forrest said it's so cloudy and hard that they have had to replace their hot water tank twice in the four years they've lived in the park. One Christmas, the tank exploded when they were away, flooding their home and causing $10,000 in damages.

"It was just so full of sediment from the water that it overheated the element inside," Forrest said.

The province placed Springfield Estates under the order because of high turbidity, or cloudiness, in the water and other issues. The park has drawn water from nearby Little Springfield Lake for decades, and is on its own private water system with a water treatment facility.

Residents must be 'protected': councillor

"Some of our most vulnerable residents live in these land-lease communities and it's imperative that we make sure that they are protected," said committee member and area Coun. Lisa Blackburn after the meeting.

Blackburn said the Westphal Court landlords are "not a mom-and-pop shop," but a dedicated business that has run multiple Halifax-area parks for generations.

"They know the business better than anybody, and they know the needs and the law — they should," Blackburn said.

Park owner Heather Scott was in the gallery at City Hall Thursday, but did not speak with the committee. CBC News requested Scott's response to the decision through her lawyer, who said Westphal Court had no comment.

Staff said during the meeting they will issue a licence to Springfield as soon as they start providing potable water.