U. City Taxpayers to Cover $127K in Seafood City Cleanup Costs

How much does it cost to cleanup a giant pile of rotting seafood? For the taxpayers of University City, it's looking like it will be at least $127,831.78 after the owners of the now-shuttered Seafood City store failed to pay for up emergency remediation.

Last night, the University City Council approved the expenditure at the recommendation of city staffers. In a memo to City Manager Gregory Rose,  Director of Planning and Development John Wagner explained that BioOneSTL spent four weeks and two days on the property "after the odor from the rotting seafood in the freezers and coolers became intolerable and unhealthy." Owner Six Fortune LLC paid for just one week of that.

"Six Fortune LLC informed me that they are not currently in a position to pay the remaining balance of $127, 831.78," Wagner wrote in his memo.

Wagner said that the city would levy a lien on the property for not only the six-figure bill it's now covering, but also its staff time.

The St. Louis County Health Department shut down the grocery store in December 2022 and then again in March, saying it was operating without a health permit. The business owner (Seafood City) and the property owner (Six Fortune LLC) are suing each other in St. Louis County Court.

The invoices from BioOneSTL make clear just what a messy job the remediation was, which began months after the shut down and only after the stench grew so bad that the city began to investigate and found "tons" of fish rotting in non-functioning freezers. The biohazard crew charged $7,000 a day for services that included a disinfectant fog machine, ozone treatments, air scrubbers, a "acid/enzyme rinse and scrub of floor/coolers/deep freezers/shelving units" and more, and generators for flood lights — so apparently workers could see all the nasty stuff they were remediating.

Interestingly, while University City taxpayers cover for this (much-need) deep clean, one of the people behind the two parties dueling in court over who's to blame is focused on his next aspiration: public office. Seafood City President Bowen Kou, as the RFT previously reported, is running for state senate in Florida, where he hopes to end the "woke agenda." But not, one hopes, leave local taxpayers on the hook for any remediation plans.

Update: Six months after we published this story, we heard from Kou, who shared his perspective by email. He wrote, "This issue should have never happened if the landlord did their job and that the building I leased was not up to code and put you and the city in a terrible spot.

"We have had the roof issue since September 2019. Based on the lease. I sent an email with HEI engineers' and structural reports to the landlord and requested the landlord to fix the roof via email. The landlord never took any action to address the issue besides just putting up a temporary fix. On December 15th, 2022, the health department had to close the store due to violations related to the ongoing water intrusion.

"After the store closed, the city did not allow anyone to enter the store. Eventually, we had to file a lawsuit against the landlord. As of today, we have a provable total damage of $7.1M damage looking to recover from the Landlord."



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