Council disbands Toronto Parking Authority board
Council backs Mayor John Tory’s motion to appoint high-level city bureaucrats to oversee the authority while a probe into a controversial land deal gets underway.

TheStar.com
July 6, 2017
Betsy Powell and Jennifer Pagliaro

Council has voted to disband the Toronto Parking Authority board while the city manager reviews the findings of the auditor general into the purchase of a parcel of land near Finch Avenue West and Hwy. 400.

Council unanimously backed Mayor John Tory’s motion to temporarily suspend the eight-member board and appoint a small group of high-level city bureaucrats to oversee the authority while the probe is underway.

“It’s our responsibility to determine what happened and to determine what lessons should be learned to determine if there was any misconduct or incompetence or both,” Tory said Thursday on the floor of council.

He added there has been no evidence of wrongdoing by TPA board members, but installing city officials will allow for a very “pure” review that is the best way to maintain public confidence, Tory said.

City Manager Peter Wallace will chair the newly constituted TPA board along with the city’s chief corporate officer and deputy city manager. They will submit their findings to council.

Council also voted to ask the integrity commissioner and lobbyist registrar to delve into circumstances around the land purchase, that was halted by Auditor General Beverley Romeo-Beehler after she criticized the TPA for not exercising due diligence in the way it handled the deal.

Romeo-Beehler’s 76-page report found the TPA, a city agency, would have overpaid $2.63 million for the land that was supposed to be acquired at fair market value.

Her report found the deal was rife with “conflicts and potential conflicts.” On Wednesday, Romeo-Beehler told council there was a “hairball of relationships” involved.

She also detailed her difficulty in obtaining information or “consistent explanations” during the investigative process.

The land deal involved: Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti; the Emery Village Business Improvement Area, of which Mammoliti is a board member; lobbyist Paul Sutherland; sign consultant Blair Murdoch; landowner Frank De Luca; and Toronto Parking Authority executives, president Lorne Persiko and vice-president Marie Casista.

When asked on the council floor what the ultimate aim was behind the land deal, the auditor general said while there was a “keen focus” on purchasing the land, “I couldn’t see that there were other benefits beyond that,” she told council on Wednesday.

Despite the consensus on the need for a board shakeup and review, council remained divided on what may or may not have happened during the real estate transaction or if anything nefarious took place.

They’re also differing opinions on the role of Councillor John Filion, one of two council TPA board members ousted Thursday, despite being a self-described whistleblower who triggered the auditor general’s investigation.

Several councillors, including Speaker Frances Nunziata, who blew the whistle on municipal corruption in York years ago, along with Councillor Josh Matlow, praised Filion for showing “courage” by taking his concerns about the property being over-valued to Romeo-Beehler.

Matlow repeated his earlier suggestion that the land deal was deeply problematic.

Other councillors were less certain that a whistle needed blowing after the release of a confidential report by Toronto lawyer Gavin MacKenzie. Retained by the TPA, MacKenzie’s report put a much different spin on events.

His report found that Filion complained to Romeo-Beehler about the land deal “before TPA staff had an opportunity to complete its due diligence and present it to the board, in accordance with its standard practice.”

Romeo-Beehler, in one of her two reports on the matter, had depicted Filion and herself “as officials whose interventions prevented the TPA from overpaying for the property,” MacKenzie wrote.

“As will be apparent from this report, in my view this rather self-congratulatory conclusion is in no way justified by facts.”

Filion said he hoped intelligent people see the TPA-commissioned legal opinion for what it is.

Mammoliti, on the other hand, said it is a “legal document” that paints Filion as a “headhunter,” not whistleblower. He said he welcomes the review by senior staff.

“The misinformation needs to be answered — there’s a whole bunch of misinformation,” Mammoliti said.

Councillor Gord Perks said while there are different views about the valuation of the land and whether members of the board “did their job,” the most critical information to come out of the auditor report was the role played by Sutherland, a former member of city council.

The auditor found that Sutherland, now a lobbyist, received $1 million in public money from the Emery Village BIA, to lobby another public entity, the Toronto Parking Authority.

“That shocks the mind,” Perks told council. “We need to absolutely make it clear to members of the public that we do not condone that and we want to understand how that happened and what we have to do to make sure it never happens again.”