Brown pays $132,000 fine

Randy Brown says he has paid $132,000 in fines to the city for his infamous trailer lot on lower 4th Avenue.

He initially balked at the bylaw charges, then after removing the trailers, said he would donate the fine to the Salvation Army instead.

Port Alberni Mayor Sharie Minions said the city rejected Brown’s proposal, and when he recently tried to sell one of his properties, found there was a lien on it, and paid the fine in order to complete the sale.

“I expected that we would collect it. I knew that it might take some time, but I knew eventually we would collect that because we had strategically placed a lien on title of all of the properties that he owns, so if he sold a property he needed to pay the lien,” she said. “With a property like this that was causing significant challenges in the community, and was housing people in the way that we deemed to be completely unacceptable, there’s always cost to address properties like that. It’s a long-term and a long-term process, and I know people wanted us to have the trailers moved significantly earlier and we need to take a strategic approach to ensure that we didn’t just evict people from the trailers or have them removed but rather we had a place set up for them to go.”

Brown maintains he saved the city millions of dollars while helping shelter homeless people on his property.

The unserviced trailers were the site of dozens of police, fire, and ambulance calls each month.