Brampton Downtown Development Corp. adopts city recommendations
Brampton Downtown Development Corp. has accepted three recommendations from city council on its purchasing policies, but says it always followed proper rules.

thestar.com
Sept. 16, 2014
By Tim Alamenciak

The board of the Brampton Downtown Development Corp. accepted council’s recommendations on its purchasing policies but maintains that it followed its procedures when doling out more than $100,000 worth of contracts to Meri-Mac Inc.

The board voted Tuesday, with little discussion, to accept three recommendations from city council that stem from a scathing auditor’s report that found dozens of violations of the corporation’s purchasing policy from January 2007 to March 2014.

“I don’t think there really is any difficulty with us operating pretty much the way we have in the past with these new recommendations,” board vice-chair David Harmsworth said at the meeting.

The recommendations suggest that the development corporation more closely align its buying policies with the city of Brampton, mandate a competitive process whenever multiple providers are available and require that all non-competitive purchases be reported to the board of directors.

“It’s a good thing that they’ve adopted the recommendations,” said Brampton Councillor Elaine Moore, who sits on a committee currently evaluating the structure of the BDDC. “When internal auditors go in to audit them in the future as they have in the past, then it will show whether or not they’ve truly adopted them and adhere to the spirit and intent of them.”

A report from the city’s senior internal auditor flagged rampant violations of procurement rules in purchases from Meri-Mac Inc. made by the BDDC, saying there was no evidence of a competitive bidding process in many cases.

The audit found that Meri-Mac, a company owned by Malcolm Scott Ching, a close friend of Mayor Susan Fennell, was awarded more than $1.1-million in contracts over the past seven years by the city and the business development corporation. The audit looked solely at the purchasing practices of the city and the BDDC, not any of the operations of Meri-Mac.

The BDDC complied with its own procurement policies in just 57 per cent of purchases from Meri-Mac because those were under the threshold of $2,500, meaning they could be awarded without competition. None of the bids awarded to Meri-Mac by the BDDC, including large bids like a $56,000 contract for Christmas wreaths, went through a competitive process, the auditor said in his report.

The agency receives about 30 per cent of its $1-million budget directly from the city and an additional 40 per cent in the form of a levy paid by local business-owners. It employs three full-time staff, one of whom is executive director Peter VanSickle, who earned $168,000 in 2013 according to the province’s sunshine list.

Harmsworth and VanSickle said the bids that Meri-Mac won did go through a competitive process, but that the proof was lost on a computer drive they did not discover until after the audit was complete.

“People can put things in hard-drives and they may have a cataloguing method that makes sense to them — doesn’t mean it’s easy to find. So we found these things, and as far as we’re concerned, they were properly represented,” said VanSickle.

Harmsworth said the files are minutes from meetings that show they had multiple quotes for bids that were ultimately awarded to Meri-Mac.

Brampton chief administrative officer John Corbett told the Brampton Guardian that the paperwork submitted was not sufficient proof that a competitive process was followed.

“That’s his opinion,” Harmsworth told the Star.