“Heads-up. We’ll keep you informed as we know more.”
That’s the note then Prince George city manager Kathleen Soltis sent Mayor Lyn Hall on Wednesday, July 4, 2018, at 1:54 p.m.
Ian Wells, then the general manager of planning development, and Kris Dalio, the city’s finance director, were CC’ed in the email.
Attached was an email sent the previous day by Frank Quinn of A & T Project Development Inc., the Park House condominium developer, about the rapidly rising costs of the adjacent parkade the company had agreed to build as part of its deal with the city.
The emails were released to The Citizen last Friday afternoon after a Freedom of Information request was made Dec. 9 to the City of Prince George for all documents pertaining to the construction of the George Street parkade.
Later on July 4, 2018, the same day Soltis first informed Mayor Hall that the parkade would cost significantly more than the $12.7 million it was budgeted for, A & T president Jeff Arnold emailed Wells and Deanna Wasnik, the city’s manager of development services, enclosing a revised budget to put the cost of the parkade at $20 million.
Yet there’s plenty missing in the emails released by the city about the parkade. It appears Hall never replied to the Soltis email from July 4, 2018, or has ever put a single word in writing about the parkade.
Perhaps because all elected officials and bureaucrats in the public service know full well that an email is a public document, subject to release in a Freedom of Information request.
Or perhaps Hall wanted nothing to do with this problem, just three months before the 2018 municipal election and his bid for a second term as mayor, where he campaigned on his downtown development record, which included the Park House project.
But there’s no reason to cynically cast doubt on why Hall never responded to the Soltis email or asked in writing for more information about the parkade’s soaring costs. He now says that he didn’t know what was going on and what his city manager and top bureaucrats were doing.
His words can be taken at face value.
The next steps, however, are to verify those claims.
The other eight city councillors merely have to ask the top bureaucrats still employed by the city – Wells, Dalio and others – if the mayor was kept informed on the parkade costs and was part of meetings. They would not be asked to reveal the content of the conversations but merely that discussions took place and when.
Furthermore, was the mayor then part of internal discussions in the spring of 2019 to revise the city manager’s delegated authority to approve additional spending without needing city council’s blessing. Before May 2019, the city manager could spend $1 million per year without council oversight. After May 2019, the new policy increased that discretionary spending to more than $8 million per year (five per cent of the city’s annual operating budget).
Was that then used to smooth over the parkade’s soaring costs, not only going forward but also going back to 2018? There seems to be nothing saying it couldn’t be.
The Citizen gave Mayor Hall six hours Monday to respond to requests for an interview to answer those questions and tell his side of the story. He never called reporter Arthur Williams back.
There are broader questions of what’s next.
How is the rest of city council supposed to accept the mayor’s word that he is looking after internal city matters when he professes to have been ignorant of what was happening with the parkade right under his nose for the last two-and-a-half years?
How are mayor and council supposed to trust the decisions and recommendations of senior administrators without wondering what’s being hidden from them?
Most crucially, how are local residents supposed to trust that their elected officials and public servants are conducting city business in a transparent and competent manner?
These questions won’t subside without a detailed accounting from an outside source of how we got here, in the form of an external audit, legal advice or both. The questions also won’t subside without transparency, both on the bureaucratic and the political side.
Finally, beware any member of city council that tries to sweep this fiasco away as nothing more than bureaucrats gone wild. Accountability isn’t accountability if it doesn’t start and end with the people ultimately in charge.
- Editor-in-chief Neil Godbout
