Captain Bowman needs to get a grip

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/01/2015 (4081 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There is a risk Mayor Brian Bowman’s obsession with appearing to do the right thing will result in council doing the wrong thing today with regard to a landmark development proposal by True North Sports & Entertainment, owner of the Winnipeg Jets and the MTS Centre.

The mayor’s desire to open the process to other potential suitors for land near the RBC Convention Centre is unlikely to produce a better deal. It will certainly delay the plan that is on the table and potentially even scuttle it, while opening new legal challenges.

The delay will cost the city tax revenue, as well as hurt the convention centre.

Here are the facts:

Stuart Olson Construction, the company expanding the RBC Convention Centre, went to former mayor Sam Katz and senior civic officials last April saying it wanted out of its legal obligation to build a hotel near the convention centre because it couldn’t find a potential hotel owner.

It was on the hook for $16 million, but offered the city a $3.75-million settlement.

Mayor Katz then asked CentreVenture, the city’s downtown development agency, if it could develop a Plan B and find a hotel.

The agency began working on the file and eventually convinced True North to do a more ambitious development involving the hotel site and an adjacent surface-parking lot.

True North at that time was only planning on developing the surface-parking lot, but it invested in new architectural drawings and plans. A legal agreement was signed with True North last September. It involved not only a top hotel, which was not guaranteed in the original deal with Stuart Olson, and a mixed-use residential/commercial building, with a large public square near the MTS Centre.

It would all be connected by skywalks to the convention centre.

Mayor Bowman now wants to break that legal agreement and force CentreVenture to issue expressions of interest for the site of the former Carlton Inn, which the city paid $6.6 million to acquire.

True North is unlikely to take legal action against the city, but the potential is there.

Mayor Bowman only discovered these facts a couple of weeks ago, around the time he suspended Deepak Joshi, the city’s acting chief administrative officer.

The rookie mayor seems to think that because he didn’t know about the previous agreements and negotiations, they are somehow invalid, null and void.

Of course this is preposterous. Any newly elected leader will find dozens of important files he knows nothing about. That doesn’t mean they are all somehow tainted.

Then-mayor Katz and some members of his inner circle had wanted the Stuart Olson matter placed on last September’s council agenda, but it never happened, probably because of the poisonous atmosphere at the time where every initiative was regarded with suspicion. Then an election was held, and the settlement and hotel issue was pushed back until now.

Mayor Bowman promised to clean up city hall, but the crusader role is interfering with his judgment.

There is no scandal here, only a good deal for taxpayers and for downtown redevelopment. If there is a perception of wrongdoing, it was created entirely by Mayor Bowman.

CentreVenture did what it was asked to do by the city and did it very well. The image of the agency today, however, is it is out of control, suffering from mission creep and obsessively secretive.

It is probably due for a review of its mandate, but it did not deserve to be treated as some rogue organization that needs to be cut down to size.

Mayor Bowman’s commitment to transparency is admirable, but even a good thing can be carried too far.