TRCA working in a renter's wonderland 328

Toronto Sun
April 9, 2014
By Sue-Ann Levy

Despite regular pleas for more public money to help prop up their watershed management efforts, the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority is sitting on 118 homes valued at $35 million, the Toronto Sun has learned.

And TRCA CEO Brian Denney -- who cashed in with about $340,000 in pension and wages in 2013 -- is living in one of the homes that are being rented, from all signs, to a limited pool of TRCA staff and others with ties to the conservation authority at modest rents of anywhere from $759 per month to at the most, $1,800 a month.

Former Toronto budget chief, Mike Del Grande, who presided over three TRCA budgets, knew nothing about the existence of the homes or that they were being rented until told by the Toronto Sun last week.

While there is nothing legally wrong with renting them, Del Grande thinks the homes are not being rented at market values considering $1,500 gets one a two-bedroom apartment - and not a very good one - in his part of Scarborough.

"If these homes aren't attracting market rent, they're basically giving subsidies to the people in there," he said. "It seems the rents were picked on the fly."

Del Grande said the proper procedure would have been to go in there and get a real estate appraisal to determine what the house would command on the open market.

But that does not appear to have happened. According to Lori Colussi, TRCA's manager of leases and risk management, the homes are advertised on Kijiji, Craigslist, through e-mails to staff, word of mouth and in Renter's News - but evidently not on MLS.

Colussi indicated by e-mail that when a home become vacant, they evaluate the rental rate and research the market to see what "other comparable rental" properties are charging to ensure they are "in line with current market conditions." She adds that the TRCA uses the guidelines established by the Ontario Housing Tribunal to determine rent increases.

Spread throughout TRCA's 44,000 acres, the 118 homes have been accumulated over the years as part of their "aggressive land banking program," says TRCA CFO Rocco Sgambelluri.

The TRCA itself has been existence since 1957, following Hurricane Hazel, and in 2012, received $49.7-million of its $96-million 2012 budget from municipalities and the provincial and federal governments. The remainder comes mostly from user fees and some fundraising. Toronto taxpayers contributed $7.8-million, about half of that coming from Toronto Water accounts.

Of the 118 homes available for rent, 40 are located in Toronto, mostly in the Rouge Park area. A total of six TRCA staff, including Denney, currently live in the homes. Only two are vacant at the moment.

It was hit and miss as to which members of the TRCA board actually knew about them.

When contacted, Jack Heath, deputy mayor of Markham, said he had no idea the TRCA owned 118 homes and that Denney lived in one of them.

"Quite frankly, I don't think it's an item that's ever come up for us to discuss," said Toronto Councillor Vince Crisanti when told of the 118 homes. "I find that at TRCA, there are a lot of best-kept secrets."

Del Grande wonders why the TRCA is holding onto the homes at all.

"They were always, yes always, crying for money when I was budget chief," Del Grande recalled, adding that he thinks the homes should be sold off. York Region Councillor Deb Schulte, another TRCA board member, said she knew the Authority owns a lot of homes but not exactly how many. She did know they were being rented out because she considered renting one herself 10 years ago. She thinks a rent of less than $1,500 per month is fair considering "they're not the best quality homes" and need work.

Denney's two-level stone home - which he rents for about $1,800 monthly - is located on Pine Valley Dr., just outside of Kleinburg, surrounded by two acres of wooded land. The home is accessed by a long driveway, framed by a tree with a "Private Property No Trespassing" sign tacked to it.

Two homes on that same street each sold for $1.1 million in the last two years.

The Toronto Sun made repeated requests to the TRCA's Information and Privacy Officer Kathy Stranks for the exact rents for Denney's property as well as for the 14 other properties in the Vaughan/Kleinburg area which were identified through a recent freedom-of-information request.

The list of those 15 properties was finally provided in February after five months of negotiations, appeals to the province and mediation. All but the most innocuous information had been blacked out. Lists of another 27 homes, located in Richmond Hill and Markham, are due to the requester by the end of May.

In a lengthy interview last week, Stranks claimed the rents were also redacted from the FOI documents (in addition to personal information about the renters) because, in discussions with her counterpart at the Ministry of Government Services (MGS), "they determined" the information was personal and should not be released.

"It could put someone possibly in pecuniary harm by releasing that information ... it could show their overall net worth," she said. "(The provincial ministry) gave advice that I should not release that information."

But after I'd learned from the MGS they'd only provided general policy advice and that Stranks herself had raised the issue of "pecuniary harm," she backtracked, conceding it was "ultimately" her decision not to provide rents specific to each property.

Pecuniary harm, or not, of the list of 15 Kleinburg-area properties -- released in February and obtained by the Toronto Sun -- some of the homes rent for as low as $759 per month with the highest around $1,800 monthly. Most rents hover around $1,200 a month, for a house with three or four bedrooms surrounded by well-treed acres full of birds and deer.

One home Sun photographer Stan Behal and I visited last week -- located at Huntington Rd. near Kleinburg -- sits atop a cliff on several acres of land with the front windows overlooking the valley and rivers below.

Denney said he first rented a house down the road from his current one in 1976 after he saw an "internal memo." He lived there until 2001 or 2002 when he moved up the road to his current location because he found his first rental home "too noisy."

He insisted he and other tenants are paying market rents -- that they've often had a hard time finding tenants at the rates they charge because of the high cost of heating the houses by oil and the lack of transit.

Yet, the homes are clearly costly to keep up. According to the TRCA's own financials, its real estate department of six made a mere $271,643 on the rental payments last year after maintenance and property tax payments were taken into consideration.

"Financially, it has not been a great thing for me to be a tenant all these years ... but it was nice to know that the rent I was paying was going back to the authority," said Denney.

Lucy Brookhouser, a Vaughan-based real estate broker, told the Toronto Sun on Monday that one of her clients just rented an older three-bedroom home in Kleinburg, with a quarter acre of land, for $2,300 a month. Depending on a number of factors, you can get rentals in the area going for as much as $10,000, she said, emphasizing that, contrary to Denney's contentions, rentals "up in the Kleinburg area are difficult to come by."

Asked why TRCA wouldn't properly fix up the homes and list them with real estate agents for sale, Denney said the vast majority of homes are in locations where they don't want future development.

PC MPP Doug Holyday, his party's accountability critic, said he didn't know about the homes but hopes they'd get rid of the properties they don't need or if someone is going to live there, "it should be at market value rent."

"If it's not market value rent, somebody is getting away with something," Holyday said.