Happy Valley-Goose Bay business out thousands after data centre shut down by town

A Happy Valley-Goose Bay business owner has been unable to convince the town to allow him to lease space in his shop to a data centre company, which he says means he's missing out on thousands of dollars in income.

"We've lived here all our lives and they're not going to talk with us or do business with us?" Lionel Letemplier said.

"I definitely do not agree with that."

Seasonal work for Voisey's Bay slowed down, he said, and demand for the steel tanks the company, Pressure Pipe Steel Fabrication, produced has dried up so he looked for ways to bring in more income.

"We had to diversity into different things in this particular building," Letemplier said.

But moving in to the data centre business did not go according to plan.

GND entered a three-year lease with Letemplier and agreed to pay him $7,000 a month to use its space and its power. "We had this opportunity to make use of this building and still have access to [it]," he said, adding that the arrangement wouldn't bring in much money but would help him keep Pressure Pipe Steel Fabrication afloat.

However, the data company was forced to remove its equipment last August after the town issued the company a stop work order at the address, because the town said the use of the building had changed without proper permission from the town.

Now the racks and power outlets GND set up to house the computers for its data centre still remain, empty, in a corner of Letemplier's business on Aspen Drive.

Stop work order

The building is in a commercial zone, so Letemplier applied for a discretionary land-use permit. However, he was in arrears on his property taxes — to the tune of about $40,000, according to him — and the town said it therefore couldn't consider the request.

"Before they shut this here down, we had an agreement with the town that there was monthly payments made," Letemplier said.

"This here is what helped us and then after they took this out, we had to cancel those monthly payments because the income that we had coming in, they took away from us."

Deputy mayor Bert Pomeroy, who also chairs the committee for development and planning for the town, said it isn't a hard line the town is taking on the business.

"We're applying our policies and regulations evenly as we would with any business in our community," Pomeroy said.

"The policy is simple, get your accounts in order and we'll do business with you."

Pomeroy said the stop work order on GND came because it was operating the data centre without a permit.

"In this case if there is an activity taking place such as a data centre, which we understand ... such as you indicated, that was his source of income -- well, he was generating income from an illegal activity," he said of Letemplier.

'Back in a heartbeat'

GND would like to set back up in the shop and has even said it would help pay off Letemplier's arrears, but the company said it would need assurances that the discretionary land-use application would be accepted.

"We'd be back in a heartbeat," president and CEO of Great North data James Goodwin said.

"It worked very well for us because of the nature of Lionel's other operation."

But the town and the businesses are at an impasse, and Pomeroy is adamant that council cannot make a decision on that application until the back taxes are taken care of.

"There's no decisions made predetermined," Pomeroy said.

"The arrears have to be paid off. Who pays them, I don't really care."

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