City staff on ‘notice,’ Tory says amid bid-rigging probe
Mayor leaves door open to more city staff leaving amid the probes.

thestar.com
By BETSY POWELL and DAVID RIDER
May 15, 2017

The fact that four senior transportation staff no longer work for the City of Toronto should put all city staff “on notice” for job performance, Mayor John Tory said Monday.

The Star and other news outlets on Friday quoted an internal city email saying three managers and a supervisor are “no longer with the organization” after a shakeup in response to an ongoing probe of potential bid rigging for paving contracts.

After an unrelated news conference in Scarborough, Tory told reporters that the auditor general’s report revealed “mismanagement,” “incompetence” and “not wrongdoing per se but just failure to adhere to the kind of standard that we would expect.”

Saying goodbye to senior staff was “not my decision - council certainly encouraged the city manager, and he had my complete encouragement, to do whatever we had to do to both take any cloud away that existed over the transportation services paving area . . .”

Asked if more city staff could be shown the door as a result of the probe, the mayor said: “It’s not up to me to decide that but I guess anything’s possible. I think, certainly I hope, everybody who works there now, and across the city for that matter, will be on notice - the public have the right to expect that people are going to perform in a manner that is competent and diligent and the vast majority of our civil servants do every single day . . .

“Where people are found by the auditor general, or anybody else, to have fallen way short of that standard I will certainly be saying to the city manager, as I did in this case, ‘I’d like to see some changes made here because you just can’t go on saying to people that you’re going to continue the same behaviour and expect a different result.”

The city refused to comment on the departures, which come amid an OPP investigation into the auditor general’s recent findings on troubling patterns in contract bidding that may have cost the city millions. The city would not say if those who left are getting severance payments.

Tory said he had “reason to believe” the OPP finished all or part of the probe triggered by city officials telling police of possible illegality. The OPP did not respond to a request for comment from the Star on Monday.

The Star reported last month that auditor general Beverly Romeo-Beehler 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.

The Star has reached out for comment to the ex-employees - Jacqueline White, director of the North York transportation district; Hector Moreno, road operations manager for Scarborough; Trevor Tenn, road operations manager in Toronto & East York; and Bruce Shaw, a maintenance contract inspection supervisor in North York.

At press time none of them had responded.