Shortlist contenders unveiled in traditional NCC style

Details about those on the shortlist are so vague as to be almost useless

If you were waiting with bated breath for the shortlist of bidders for LeBreton Flats, you can now exhale in a long, slow, disappointed sigh.

It’s not that the shortlisted projects are necessarily lacklustre — although they might turn out to be — it’s that they are so vague as to be almost useless. There are certainly no artists’ renderings, or even full partner lists of the shortlisted teams. Why did the National Capital Commission bother to release the shortlist at all?

Of the four bids on the list, only two make any immediate sense.

The first is the Ottawa Senators’ proposal to build a new arena, although the word “Senators” never appears in any NCC documents. Instead, the proponent is known only as RendezVous LeBreton Group, and is widely believed to include Trinity Developments as partner. In addition to a sports and entertainment centre, the Senators’ bid promises to include greenspace, and residential and commercial development.

No matter what you think about the suitability of putting an NHL arena on federally owned land — and it’s not a slam-dunk that that’s appropriate — the Senators’ plan appears doable. We actually have a professional hockey team, although perhaps not the richest in the league, and there’s a plan to build real estate to pay for some of that arena.

Second place for bid-most-based-in-reality is the Claridge Homes proposal for a major programmed park with indoor and outdoor concert facilities and other “cultural enterprises.” This proposal appears to be the “greenest” of the shortlisted projects — think Central Park in New York, or Millennium Park in Chicago. Like all the bids, Claridge is proposing residential and commercial development to help pay for the public spaces.

There are some questions about the Claridge vision, such as whether this city can support more concert space. And what kind of “cultural enterprises” is the company talking about? No one can say (more on that in a minute). And Claridge will be fighting its own reputation: its condo development on the first phase of LeBreton is not altogether well-loved in this city, to put it mildly.

Still, Claridge actually has money to see its project through, which is hardly a minor point. And the company has retained Toronto landscape architect George Dark, a well-respected consultant who’s very familiar with Ottawa as he’s been hired by the city on numerous occasions.

As for the last two proposals, well, they might be just about anything. All we know about a bid led by Devcore Group is that the Gatineau developer is proposing to build “multiple cultural institutions” around “a grande allée.” And the bid from Focus Equities is bizarre: it’s proposing to “house the headquarters of an international organization,” along with building some cultural venues.

What international organization? You probably should have one more-or-less signed up before you put in a bid promising to house its headquarters in your new real estate development.

But maybe Focus Equities — a Victoria commercial and industrial developer — has an international organization in mind. We don’t know, because we aren’t allowed to ask anyone at the company.

In its Request for Qualifications, the NCC stipulates that there are to be no “public announcements, comments or media releases” about the bids at during the RFQ, or the upcoming Request for Proposals stage, which the four shortlisted proponents are now entering. Speaking publicly about details of the bids “is grounds for disqualification, at the sole discretion of the NCC.”

But everyone’s confused about whether the NCC really means it. A request for clarification from NCC officials remained unanswered by deadline.

This secrecy demand is nonsense. Sure, there are details that proponents will want to hold back for competition’s sake, but that’s their call — not the NCC’s. More importantly, most of these bids call for the inclusion of cultural institutions, which should have a public consultation component to their mandates. So how can a proponent approach a cultural group but keep it all secret?

Take the central library as an example. A number of proposals are thought to have earmarked a location for a library. But the bidder can only include a main branch in its plans if it comes to an agreement with the city. The city is planning a major public consultation on a new library. So how can the proponent(s) participate in the city’s library process if all details of its bid are supposed to be kept secret? It’s absurd. And for good measure, the NCC has added an extra dab of its trademark obfuscation and confusion to the process.

The RFP will not be made public, which makes no sense. If the rules are the same for all the bidders, why can’t we see what those rules are?

And it turns out that the public won’t get to know what the scoring criteria are until after the final bids are in. If the NCC is going to release the criteria, as it surely must, then why not sooner rather than later?

We’re off to a troubling start on the redevelopment of LeBreton Flats. Secrecy, vagueness, confusion. If the NCC was actually trying to make people indifferent to the possibilities for one of the most significant sites in the core of our capital, then mission accomplished.