The District of West Vancouver is taking a British Properties couple to court, alleging they reneged on a legal agreement to repair damages from a landslide caused by illegal construction on their property.
Between 2008 and 2011, Mohammad Mehdi Khalili and Pouran Amini built a home and pool on their 2.12-acre property on Stevens Drive, according to a notice of civil claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court last month.
The backyard of the property is steeply sloped and backs onto the district’s Houlgate Creek Park. During construction, the defendants built a series of retaining walls and added fill to the property without permits and contravening several bylaws, the suit claims.
The district sued the couple in 2015. In 2016, the municipality hired a consultant who filed a report confirming the backyard’s slope was unstable and the retaining walls did not meet acceptable engineering standards. The district provided the report to Khalili and Amini.
In their response to the original lawsuit, the couple denied they had contravened any bylaws.
In November 2018, a landslide occurred in the backyard, causing “a significant amount of timber and debris to cascade down onto the park lands,” the claim states.
“The landslide event was caused by the defendants’ alteration of the property and their failure to ensure the steep slope on the property was geotechnically stable,” the district alleges in the latest court documents.
Even after the slide, the district asserts the park and anyone in it is still at risk of another slide “unless excessive load is safely removed from the slope.”
In July of this year, the defendants wrote a letter to the district offering to settle the original suit.
In their proposal, they agreed to provide permit-ready drawings to remove a basketball court and “all overburden” on the property, remediate the damage caused by the slide, and complete “all other works associated with the existing retaining walls” within eight months. If they failed to comply within that timeframe, the owners agreed to pay $25,000 for every 30 extra days needed.
They also agreed to pay $50,000 to cover the district’s expenses related to the slide and put up $150,000 to be held in trust until the work was done, court documents show. In exchange, they wanted the original suit dropped and a release discharging them from any future liability related to the slide, according to the suit.
District council accepted the offer on July 21. But, by October, Khalili and Amini had “ceased taking steps to implement the settlement,” the civil claim says.
On Oct. 30, the defendants’ lawyer advised council they would be backing out of the agreement.
“The district says that the settlement is binding on the defendants and that the district is entitled to performance of the settlement plus damages arising from the defendants’ delay,” the claim states. “In any event, the district says that the excess load must be promptly removed from the slope in the backyard of the property to prevent another landslide pending the final resolution of this proceeding.”
The district is asking the court to order Khalili and Amini to carry out the work they promised they would in the settlement, plus damages or an order permitting the district to do the work themselves and pass the costs on to the owners.
Through their law firm, Khalili and Amini have declined to comment on the case.
