A city that couldn’t shoot straight

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/03/2015 (3894 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just when your trust in city hall had hit bottom, it turns out there’s a bottom below.

We knew city hall had become a cesspool of mismanagement and deceit, as well as contempt for the principles of transparency and openness. A series of real estate audits laid bare and unimpeachable those facts.

Now, exclusive reports by Free Press reporter-at-large Bartley Kives show how civic officials kept councillors out of the loop on the cost to purchase the former downtown Canada Post building and convert it into a new police headquarters building. Nor was the full story shared with elected officials on the comparative value of buying the post office versus renovating and rebuilding on the existing site near city hall.

Some of the new information was revealed in documents the city had refused to release under freedom-of-information legislation on the specious grounds it constituted advice to government. The city changed its mind after being lambasted by the Manitoba ombudsman. It’s difficult to avoid the observation the unwarranted secrecy was motivated more by self-interest than the public interest.

In any event, a consultant told city officials in April 2009 it would cost nearly $180 million to implement the post office option. (The final price is over $200 million). Later that year, however, a report to council said the cost was just $135 million. The lower price was achieved by subtracting all the so-called soft costs, such as engineering, architectural fees, furniture, equipment and other costs that are normally included in such reports.

Apparently the $45-million discrepancy was considered incidental and of no value to the decision-makers on council.

The various parties in this apparent deception have pointed fingers at one another, with one firm saying its estimate was based only on hard capital costs. That is probably true, but it was up to city officials to ensure council had all the information it needed to make a decision.

It’s called democracy, but in the world that operated under former mayor Sam Katz, elected officials were apparently not worthy of evaluating pertinent information.

Let’s stop here to remind the civil service at city hall it is not the ruling party. The mayor and 15 councillors are the governing elite who have a right to receive reports with full and transparent information on major issues before them.

Bureaucrats are expected to make judgment calls in evaluating the quality and content of information placed on council’s table.

But that’s not what happened in a series of real estate transactions over the last 10 years, where council was either kept in the dark or provided incomplete or misleading information.

This has always happened at city hall, but manipulation of the political process under Mr. Katz and former CAO Phil Sheegl was carried out on a scale and magnitude not seen before. The cost in dollars and trust is hard to calculate.

The capital cost of renovating the Public Safety Building and other rundown police buildings, for example, might have been similar in cost to buying and remodelling the former Canada Post Building, depending on the options selected. The current plan, however, leaves the city with buildings, including the civic parkade, that need major capital upgrades or outright demolition. For this and other reasons, the best financial deal for taxpayers might have been to rebuild on the existing site rather than embarking on a complex journey to renovate a former post office.

The essential point, however, is councillors did not have all the information they needed to make an informed decision. The public was also denied an opportunity to debate the options.

At the same time, while the civil service was making selective decisions on its own authority, councillors had an obligation to be more aggressive in asserting their oversight role.