Report clears Brampton staff of wrongdoing
A Brampton report clears senior staff of misleading council in a $500-million downtown development deal.
“The city was well-served by its staff,” municipal lawyer George Rust-D’Eye said in his report, released Monday.
The probe was ordered by council after a lawsuit filed against the city alleged staff wrongdoing in the deal. Monday’s report was largely based on information that was provided to Rust-D’Eye by city officials to substantiate the propriety of the staff decisionmaking process in 2010 and 2011.
That’s when staff selected the eventual bid winner, Dominus Construction, and negotiated the final deal. Only the first of the project’s three phases was negotiated, at a cost of $205 million over 25 years. Dominus has since sold its stake in the project.
Rust-D’Eye acknowledges that some of the allegations raised by councillors were not addressed in his report. He instead states that some of the issues he was hired to look into “may be addressed by the court in the ongoing Inzola proceedings against the city, a rigorous and comprehensive process in which the court will exercise its jurisdiction on the basis of sworn testimony.”
The court case Rust-D’Eye refers to is a $28.5-million lawsuit by developer Inzola Group, which alleges it was unfairly disqualified from bidding on the lucrative project. It was comments from staff in court documents for the case that led council to call for a probe. Rust-D’Eye was recommended for the job by former Brampton chief administrative officer John Corbett, one of the staffers on the selection team for the project.
Rust-D’Eye was paid at least $160,000 to produce his report, but one of the councillors who called for the probe is already dismissing its findings as “incomplete” and wholly reliant on information from the very staff at the centre of the controversy.
It sets up what could be a public confrontation next week between the author of the report and those who demanded the investigation.
“I don’t understand how this report took more than seven months and at least $160,000. He has gone to staff for the answers. These are the same staff that created this whole controversy in the first place. He has just taken whatever they said to him as fact,” said Councillor John Sprovieri.
The report clears staff and members of council, at the time, of a variety of allegations, including: The decision to disqualify Inzola; Any undue influence to guarantee that Dominus would win the bid;
Accepting a bid that does not offer good value for taxpayers;
Failing to ensure the city’s zoning requirements were adhered to;
An overly secret process carried out by staff, preventing council and the public from making informed decisions about the project.
Sprovieri pointed to some of the report’s findings, including one on a key controversy in the court case.
In 2011, staff funded a $480,000 option on a parcel of land for Dominus needed for phase two of the project, without ever informing council. Sprovieri pointed to the court docu- ments, which suggest staff had told council in March 2011 that Dominus had secured the land before council voted to accept the developer as the bid winner, when the land was not actually secured prior to the vote.
Last year, when the option for Dominus was expiring, staff recommended to council that the city buy the parcel of land.
“Subsequently, issues were raised as to whether or not Dominus had a legally binding right to secure the land in question, but in view of the fact that city council ultimately acquired the land, and ratified the exercise of the option, I have not conducted a thorough review of this issue,” Rust-D’Eye states in his report.
“Regarding the $480,000,” Sprovieri said, “what (Rust-D’Eye) essentially says is that regardless of what staff did in 2011, it’s irrelevant because council decided to buy the land in 2014. So what you might do that is wrong at one point in time, is excused because of what happened later.
“I look forward to questioning him next week.”
In his report, Rust-D’Eye addressed concerns that had been raised about him being in a conflict when asked to investigate staff who may have hired him for previous work on the project. He said he was not in a conflict and that he had no previous involvement with the project “directly or indirectly.”
Councillors say a public meeting to address Rust-D’Eye and his report will be scheduled for Monday, May 4, at 7 p.m. at Brampton council chambers.