Openness builds trust
Abit of advice for the embattled Toronto Parking Authority as it seeks to show the public it has nothing to hide: stop trying to hide things.
If the public agency wants to disperse the cloud of suspicion that has gathered since a recent auditor general’s investigation raised troubling questions about the authority’s operations, it should welcome just the sort of scrutiny it is now working hard to avoid. Transparency and trust go hand in hand.
The controversy in which the parking authority now finds itself centres on a fishy land deal. As the city’s auditor general, Beverly Romeo-Beehler, reported to council earlier this month, the parking authority was set to buy a plot of land in North York for more than $2.63 million over fair market value. It stopped short of doing so, the AG said, only because city councillor and TPA board member John Filion blew the whistle.
The deal was the product of what Romeo-Beehler colourfully described as a “hairball” of relationships and potential conflicts of interest involving a diverse cast of characters. Whether this points to criminality, incompetence or something more benign remains to be seen. In any case, council was sufficiently disturbed by the details of the auditor’s investigation to temporarily replace the TPA’s board with senior city managers and sic two of the city’s watchdogs on the authority.
Those are good steps, but it may well ultimately require a criminal investigation to clear the air — an opportunity the authority should welcome.
However, just as important, as the TPA seeks to rebuild the public trust, is that it begin to tackle the culture of secrecy that has no doubt contributed to its current predicament.
The TPA spent considerable time and money to resist and rebut the auditor general’s investigation and yet more to thwart efforts by this newspaper to open the agency to public scrutiny. As the Star’s Jayme Poisson and Jennifer Pagliaro reported this week, the authority is continuing to fight to keep secret the salaries of its top executives, including its president, Lorne Persiko, who has been put on paid leave pending an investigation into the land deal. Secrecy is never a good look on a public agency, not least one mired in scandal.
The TPA, unlike most public institutions in the province, has the choice not to disclose its executives’ salaries because of a loophole in Ontario’s transparency laws. The arm’s-length agency, which manages the city’s parking spots, is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars of public assets. But because it pays its own operating costs, rather than drawing from general government revenues, it is exempt from appearing on the Sunshine List.
This makes no sense. As Mayor John Tory rightly pointed out this week, “All the money in the Toronto Parking Authority is public money.” As such, the authority should be held to the same standards of transparency and accountability as other public institutions. The province should change the rules, but the TPA ought not wait to release the figures.
The questions now swirling around the parking authority will not simply go away. To rebuild the public trust, the TPA will have to try something new: openness and accountability.