City wants refund on garbage contracts
Report shows double-dipping
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante said she’s going to try to get back money the city’s inspector general said was illicitly taken from Montrealers by a garbage contractor.
“It’s unacceptable that Montrealers pay for garbage that came from other cities,” Plante said. “If there is a way to recuperate money that Montrealers paid for services they didn’t get, we’ll do that.”
A report from Denis Gallant found a company paid by the weight of garbage collected in the boroughs of Verdun and Sud- Ouest had also been charging Montreal taxpayers for the collection of trash in other municipalities. The report found that Services Environnementaux Richelieu had been collecting garbage from private companies for which it was paid, and then was picking up garbage in Verdun and the Sud- Ouest before dumping all of the garbage together.
In his report, Gallant said he alerted Quebec’s anti-corruption commissioner as well as the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF), which determines whether a company can bid on public contracts, about the findings of his year-long investigation into the company. Gallant also said the city didn’t do proper surveillance, saying the trucks were not systematically weighed before they started the job, nor did city employees pay enough attention to the GPS trackers on the trucks.
Speaking to the Montreal Gazette on Monday, Verdun borough Mayor Jean-François Parenteau said the report’s findings are “unacceptable” and changes will be made in how such contracts are supervised.
Parenteau, the executive committee member in charge of city services, assured the citizens of the two boroughs involved that they would not have to pay for the conduct of the company in question, and that both contracts were cancelled. The company will be obliged to continue the service for the next 45 days while the boroughs go to tender on new contracts.
Parenteau also pledged that the lack of contract oversight by city officials cited in the report will be examined and corrected. “This is a big wake-up call for all boroughs to make sure that we apply the processes properly,” he said.
Parenteau said it was borough employees who flagged the situation to the inspector general’s office after citizens complained about the service, and after the company was also caught dumping recycling collectables in the garbage dump.
Speaking to reporters Monday, Lionel Perez, the leader of the opposition Ensemble Montréal, said it was his party that gave the city the proper tools that allowed it to flag this problem in the first place.
Former mayor Denis Coderre created the office of the inspector general, and his administration also mandated that trucks collecting garbage and removing snow for the city be outfitted with GPS trackers.
“Without (those measures), we would not have known what had transpired in those contracts,” he said. “What the administration now has to answer is if there is a similar situation in other boroughs, and if this is also a problem with snow removal.”