Senior managers ‘no longer’ working for city amid bid-rigging allegations
Departures come in wake of an ongoing OPP investigation into possible bid rigging connected to city paving contracts.
thestar.com
By JENNIFER PAGLIARO
May 12, 2017
Four senior transportation services employees, including three managers, are no longer employed by the city in the wake of an ongoing investigation into potential bid rigging of paving contracts, the Star has confirmed.
An internal memo sent by transportation services boss Barbara Gray on Thursday and seen by the Star read, in part: “We have made some management changes to better align our division to meet operational needs” and explained four managers were “no longer with the organization.”
Those managers are:
- Jacqueline White, director of the North York district of the division.
- Hector Moreno, the road operations manager in Scarborough district.
- Trevor Tenn, the road operations manager in Toronto & East York District.
- Bruce Shaw, one of two maintenance contract inspection supervisors in the road operations section of the North York district.
The city refused to comment on the departures, which come amid an ongoing OPP investigation into the auditor general’s recent findings on troubling patterns in contract bidding that may have cost the city millions.
“We do not discuss personnel matters,” city spokesperson Wynna Brown wrote in an email Friday. “I can, however, confirm that there have been some recent management changes in transportation services. These changes are aimed at better positioning the transportation services division to achieve its operational requirements.”
Brown would not say if the former employees were fired or if they will receive severance packages.
The Star reported last month that the OPP is now investigating suspicious bidding uncovered by the city’s auditor general Beverly Romeo-Beehler, who found companies may have been working together to drive up the contract award price, with the winning bidder at times sub-contracting the work to the losing firms.
She did not name the companies.
Paving contracts are managed by the city’s transportation services division, whose staff the audit also focused on.
In her report, Romeo-Beehler concluded “transportation staff possessed a poor understanding of the red flags indicating contractors may be engaged in fraud, bid rigging and collusion” and that staff “could provide no plausible explanation” for troubling occurrences like the apparent market domination by a small number of companies.
City manager Peter Wallace spoke forcefully to council last month about the need for change, noting outdated practices that saw bids being managed mostly on paper and inconsistently across districts.
He noted a lack of resources and modernization that have allowed those problems to persist.
“Does anyone in this (council) chamber know how many internal auditors there are? I think it's about half a dozen. That's an absolute joke and that should never have existed,” Wallace said in the council chamber.
