David Broadland

November 2014 Key votes at City Hall raise questions about the judgment of some councillors seeking re-election. THE PRIMARY ROLE OF NEWS MEDIA in a democratic society is to provide citizens with information and analysis on important issues that allow those citizens to hold their government accountable for the decisions it makes and the actions it takes. This is particularly important in the period just before an election. If a politician has played a significant role in enabling an unfolding fiscal disaster, for instance, the period just before an election is the time to make that clear. For that politician, though, just before an election is a really inconvenient time for truth-telling. It’s an excellent time to say things like, “It’s with the lawyers, so I can’t talk about it.” That’s what’s going on right now with the Johnson Street Bridge project. At the beginning of the current council’s term, the official budget for the project was $77 million. Since then the cost has apparently escalated to $108 million, but nobody at City Hall will talk about it. This is a déjà vu moment if ever there was one. The same thing happened before the last civic election and that led to one of the most revealing episodes in the term of the mayor and councillors. I am referring to the City’s attempt to silence analysis and criticism of its management of the bridge project. Councillors distinguished themselves one way or another on this issue, and now all but one of them is seeking re-election. Here are the basics of what happened. In March of 2012, the price tag for the Johnson Street Bridge project suddenly rose from $77 million to $92.8 million. Focus filed an FOI and the information released to us a couple of months later showed that senior City staff knew two days after the 2011 civic election that the price tag had risen by at least $5.8 million due to an escalation in construction costs. A question occurred to us: Did City Hall actually know this before the election? This was an important question of accountability: then City Manager Gail Stephens had made a very clear and public report to City councillors 45 days before the election in which she stated that the project continued to be within the $77 million budget. Had she misled councillors and the public just before an election? At the same time that Focus obtained this information, a City Hall insider provided Ross Crockford, a freelance journalist, with a tip: there was a “smoking gun” in the City’s finance department records that would show that Stephens and other senior bridge project managers had been told the project had incurred significant expenses that were not included in the council-approved budget. In May of 2012, Crockford filed a carefully-worded FOI for records from the finance department that was practically guaranteed to find that “smoking gun,” if it existed. While Crockford negotiated a fee for the requested records, the City made a Section 43 application to Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. The application covered Crockford, Focus Editor Leslie Campbell, myself, and “any persons acting on their behalf.” The practical effect of this application was to immediately cut off all of our rights to access public records, including Crockford’s request for the “smoking gun.” In doing so, the City became only the second public body that had ever used this provision of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to limit a journalist’s access to public records. The City said that it had to make the application to Denham because it was being overwhelmed by requests from Crockford and Focus. But in the first seven months of 2012, aside from the “smoking gun” information request, Crockford had filed only two FOIs. Focus had filed five, only one of which had taken enough City staff time that a fee had been applied. (This fee was later appealed by Focus as being unreasonable and Denham’s office agreed, directing the City to return 60 percent of it.) In other words, the City’s claim that it was being overwhelmed with requests was unsupportable. You may recall the City withdrew its Section 43 application without submitting any evidence of its claims to Denham’s office. But before it did that, a vote was held by City councillors on the issue. That vote boiled down to whether councillors supported City staff’s attempt to limit press access to public records, or whether they opposed it. For the record, those councillors in favour of limiting press access to public records included Mayor Fortin and councillors Alto, Coleman, Thornton-Joe and Madoff. Those opposed to limiting press access to public records included councillors Helps, Young, Isitt and Gudgeon. A few months later, the “smoking gun” Crockford was seeking was released to him by the City. It was a memo from acting Assistant Finance Director Troy Restell that showed Stephens had been warned by her finance department in August, 2011 (well before the election) that $5.2 million in project costs had not been included in the council-approved budget of $77 million. When added to the $5.8 million in additional construction costs the City was officially notified of two days after the 2011 civic election, it became clear that Stephens may have misreported the financial state of the project just before an election. In April, 2013, a group of Victoria citizens, including Crockford, wrote to Stephens asking her to provide a legitimate explanation for why she had reported the project was on budget. Not receiving a response, they then asked Mayor Fortin to hold an inquiry. Fortin’s position was that Stephens hadn’t made a full report and at the time she claimed the project was on budget, she believed it was on budget. Councillors Young and Helps were very vocal in their support of the citizens’ request that Stephens provide an explanation for why she had reported the project was on budget. Under the chilling influence of a threatened lawsuit, however, the issue disappeared from public discussion. Stephens’ lawyer Joe Arvay told Focus,“n the fall of 2011, Ms. Stephens was advised that some of the estimated costs had actually been reduced, based on changes to the cost of materials and that such cost-savings would offset any of the added costs set out in the [finance] memo.” Focus then filed an FOI seeking the record that would support Stephens’ claim. The City could find no such record. The issue boiled down to whether the mayor and councillors supported the right of citizens to hold Stephens accountable for her report that the bridge project was on budget. The record shows that Mayor Fortin did not support that right; Helps and Young made it clear they did. Other councillors were publicly silent on the issue. Three months later, Stephens resigned. The central event that led to the current mystery about the project’s cost happened on the last day of 2012, when councillors approved the contract City staff had negotiated with PCL Constructors Westcoast. The meeting was closed to the public but Focus obtained the minutes through an FOI request. City staff provided councillors with a report that stated, “The City’s Consultant, MMM Group, has reviewed the contract documents prepared by FMC [the City’s legal adviser on procurement] and the City, including optimizations, contingency, project risks and the value engineering opportunities, and in their professional opinion recommend that the City proceed with the project and enter into a contract with PCL Westcoast.” According to the minutes of that meeting, the wisdom of the 3.9 percent contingency that the agreement depended on was questioned by some councillors, notably by Young and Isitt. A vote was held on whether to award PCL the construction contract. The issue boiled down to this: Was the assurance councillors had been given that City engineers and their professional advisers had all their ducks in a row, including that small contingency, credible? The minutes show that only councillors Lisa Helps and Ben Isitt had doubts strong enough that they voted against City staff’s recommendation to sign the contract with PCL. The minutes also show that none of the councillors questioned MMM’s recommendation, or even asked to see it. What, exactly, did it say? Focus filed an FOI for MMM’s written recommendation but the City now admits that no such written record exists. It was just someone at MMM providing a verbal recommendation to someone at the City of Victoria that, sure, it seems okay to us. In February, PCL submitted a $9.5-million change order to the City. The company has since submitted an additional change order for an undisclosed sum. The City handed over the first change order to MMM for advice. MMM’s advice to the City was that PCL’s request for more money should be refused. Ironically, MMM argued that PCL’s bid proposal contained such extensive design changes that its bid should have included a much higher contingency, on the order of 40 percent. With no written proof that MMM did, in fact, recommend the City accept PCL’s bid, including the small contingency, the prospects of any legal action by the City against MMM for providing dubious advice seem limited. Whatever the quality of MMM’s advice, it has been expensive. In June, 2010, MMM told the City that project management and engineering costs would amount to 12 percent of construction costs. That’s the industry standard. The City has already paid, or committed to pay, $12.5 million to MMM since April 2009, and MMM recently told the City they and their subcontractor will need an additional $2.4 million to complete the job. If they get that, their $14.9 million would represent 23 percent of the $66 million construction cost the City is counting on, almost double the industry standard. The key MMM employee the City has been working with since 2009 is Joost Meyboom. Meyboom conducted the original condition assessment of the Blue Bridge back in 2008. His first recommendation to the City, following his examination of the bridge (the Delcan Report), was to “retrofit rather than replace.” Back then Meyboom told City staff that a retrofit “to lifeline standards can be achieved by installing a new, relatively flexible foundation to relieve the existing timber pile arrangement. Together with electrical/mechanical upgrades, painting and other rehab items this retrofit option is currently estimated to cost in the order of $8.6 million.” This recommendation was hidden from the public until an FOI by Focus found it. But by then momentum for a new bridge was so strong it didn’t matter: nobody believed it. At consequential turning points in the project’s history, City staff have hidden the difficulties the project was encountering. Perhaps that’s not surprising. What was unexpected was the degree to which that secrecy would be supported by Mayor Fortin and several of his councillors. Such secrecy not only frustrates deliberation by the public, it can also lead to exceedingly expensive government. The preliminary estimate for fixing the bridge was $8.6 million. The project is now sporting a $108-million price tag. That’s a 1200 percent ballooning from the preliminary estimate. Now consider this: A preliminary estimate of the City’s infrastructure deficit is “$600 million.” Voters might want to ask themselves, as they mark their ballots on November 15, if they’re confident the candidates they’re voting for have what it takes to keep that from blowing up by 1200 percent. Just say’n. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

October 2014 An FOI request for the record of how environmental assessments for gas plants were axed last spring catches government and industry in flagrante. PERHAPS YOU ALREADY KNOW that fossil fuel corporations get the satisfaction they desire in BC when it comes to regulations affecting their industry. But have you ever wondered how, precisely, that business takes place? Is it done behind closed doors? Over the telephone? In a back alley behind the convention centre? BC’s Environmental Assessment Office (EAO) carries out extensive reviews of proposed major projects in the province before they’re permitted to proceed. For example, in 2009 when Encana proposed to build the $900-million Cabin Gas Plant project in the Horn River Basin, the Environmental Assessment Act required the EAO to consider the potential environmental, economic, social, heritage and health impacts posed by the project. As well, the assessment process provided a structure for participation in the review by the project proponent, First Nations and the public. There are, after all, a lot of legitimate concerns about such large-scale industrial projects. Last April, Environment Minister Mary Polak announced essentially all gas plant projects like Encana’s Cabin project would be exempted from environmental assessments. Recently, the record of how the government made that decision was revealed following an FOI request filed by Canadian Press reporter Dene Moore. The documents obtained show the process leading to the elimination of environmental assessments for gas plants was heavily influenced by a registered lobbyist in the employ of Encana. Although the group of civil servants considering how to reform the environmental assessment process for gas plants recommended transferring responsibility for environmental assessments to the BC Oil and Gas Commission, their recommendation was ignored. Instead, the Provincial cabinet decided to accept industry’s request to eliminate environmental assessments altogether, and issued two Orders in Council amending the Environmental Assessment Act and the Reviewable Projects Regulation. I will go into more detail later about how the reform process was influenced by industry, but first let me provide you with some details about gas processing plant projects that puts the cabinet’s decision—and what motivated it—in some perspective. The EAO’s 2009 review of Encana’s proposed Cabin project concluded it would have “significant adverse environmental effects.” The EAO came to that conclusion because the Cabin project would process 800 million cubic feet of gas daily from the Horn River Basin. Shale gas from that basin happens to contain a lot of carbon dioxide—12 percent by volume. Carbon dioxide is the main greenhouse gas implicated in climate change. Numbers provided to the EAO by Encana back in 2009 indicated the plant, when completed, would emit 2.2 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. To put that figure in perspective, that’s just a little less than the 2.8-million-tonne annual drop in emissions the Province says has occurred since 2008. The EAO concluded that there was no available reservoir for carbon sequestration and, in any case, that would be “prohibitively expensive.” The carbon dioxide, separated from the natural gas as it is prepared for sale, would simply be vented to the atmosphere. The assessment report concluded the Cabin plant would increase BC’s overall emissions by 3.3 percent. Thus the conclusion of “significant adverse environmental effects.” In spite of that, Encana was granted a permit to build the plant. The first phase has now been built, but Encana and their partner in the project, Spectra Energy, decided to delay making the project operational until market conditions improve. The emissions the Cabin plant will add do not yet show up on the Province’s inventory of emissions, but as sure as summer follows spring, they’re coming. On the heels of the Cabin project, a 2013 environmental assessment of Quicksilver Resources’ proposal for a gas processing plant at Fortune Creek in the Horn River Basin came to the same conclusions: “Emissions from the proposed project are at a level that will make it more challenging for the Province to achieve its legislated greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.” “More challenging” is a bit of an understatement. Once all three phases of the Fortune Creek plant are in operation, according to the EAO, the plant will process 600 million cubic feet of gas each day, and, as a consequence, will emit 2.436 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. The Fortune Creek environmental assessment also noted, again, that there was no available reservoir for sequestering that carbon dioxide. Again, it would have to be vented to the atmosphere. The assessment calculated that this one plant would increase BC’s overall emissions by 3.9 percent. As with the Cabin project, the assessment concluded there would be “significant adverse environmental effects.” The cabinet approved the project and construction of the first phase has been completed. Its emissions have not yet appeared in the provincial tally. So when Environment Minister Mary Polak announced last April that environmental assessments for such plants would be eliminated, she was getting rid of the process that quantified and made public the significant greenhouse gas emissions associated with such projects, and that allowed the public and First Nations to express their concerns on this and other potential impacts. One political rationale for eliminating assessments is this: The Province is trying to create favourable conditions to attract investment for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry here. But to feed even two LNG plants on the coast there would need to be dozens of projects like the Cabin and Fortune Creek plants preparing Horn River Basin shale gas for transmission to the coast, where it would be liquefied and shipped to Asia. Imagine the unfortunate optics of the cabinet ignoring report after report from the EAO, each one coming to the same conclusion that it did for Cabin and Fortune Creek: significant adverse environmental effects, another challenge to emission reduction targets. The Liberals are stuck with at least appearing to meet their own legislated emission reduction targets stipulated in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Targets Act. The Province currently claims it met its 2012 reduction target, but either Cabin or Fortune Creek coming fully on line would effectively cancel out that reduction. With these two conflicting objectives—LNG development on the one hand and emission reductions on the other—pulling the Liberals in opposite directions, which one will prevail, and why? The best possible data for answering that question is contained in the documents obtained recently by Moore, which consist of a series of emails and attached documents. Eliminating environmental assessments, it turns out, began with a directive in June, 2013, from Premier Christy Clark. It’s unknown what, exactly, Clark commanded, but by August 28, 2013, a “Natural Gas Plant Proliferation Project Charter” (the Charter) had been created, along with a “Natural Gas Processing Plant Working Group”—a joint undertaking of the Ministry of Natural Gas Development, the Ministry of Environment, the Environmental Assessment Office, and the Oil and Gas Commission. The project, essentially, was to determine how to reform the environmental assessment process in light of expected “proliferation” of gas processing plants needed for LNG development. The impetus for reviewing the environmental assessment process for gas plants, according to the Charter, originated with a complaint by Encana. The Charter noted that: “Encana representatives have stated that the environmental assessment timeline of 18 months is a barrier to industry and creates an incentive to build plants [with a capacity of less than] 200 million cubic feet of gas each day.” Under BC’s Reviewable Projects Regulation, only plants that process more than 200 million cubic feet per day, or emit more than 2 tonnes of sulphur per day, have to undergo an environmental assessment. Whoever wrote the Charter didn’t seem aware that Encana’s initial Cabin project proposal to EAO was dated January 26, 2009, and that by January 28, 2010—only 13 months later—the project had been approved by the cabinet. But I digress. The Charter went on to state: “Encana has asked that the regulation be changed to exempt sweet gas processing facilities from the environmental assessment process.” “Sweet gas” is natural gas that is lower in sulphur content. According to the Oil and Gas Commission, ninety-nine percent of gas in BC is processed as sweet gas. The Charter noted that the Ministry of Natural Gas Development was forecasting that 26 to 40 new gas plants—depending on whether they had capacities of 200 or 400 million cubic feet per day—would be needed in the Montney Basin “to supply LNG export needs for government targets of 82 megatonnes” per year. The Charter observed: “EAO and the Oil and Gas Commission anticipate that cumulative effects concerns will arise when a multitude of new wells and gas processing facilities are proposed.” What seems to be the issue here is not so much the cumulative effects, but the concerns about those cumulative effects. The Charter’s “Project Scope” stated: “Policy review is confined to developing options for managing sweet natural gas plant development in the Montney Basin.” It went on to declare that the interests of “stakeholders,” including “Montney Basin First Nations” and “communities” “must be considered throughout the project.” The original direction, then, was to leave EAO assessments in place for the other major shale gas basins in BC: the Horn River Basin, the Cordova Embayment, the Liard Basin and the Doig formation. The Montney Basin lies to the south of the Horn River Basin and contains far less—2.0 to 2.5 percent—carbon dioxide. What we know happened subsequently, though, is that the reform process snowballed to include environmental assessments for gas processing plants for all basins, including the carbon-dioxide-rich Horn River Basin. This would have been of special interest to Encana, which spent hundreds of millions acquiring drilling rights on over 116,000 hectares of Crown land in the Horn River Basin, where prices reached nearly $4000 per hectare in 2008 before natural gas prices plummeted in North America. How did that scope growth happen? The email record obtained by Moore shows the process immediately started to go off the track. Or get on track, depending on your perspective. On September 6, 2013, Trish Balcean, lead for the EAO on the Working Group, notified her fellow members that she “had a good discussion with Encana this AM,” and reminded them of the first meeting that afternoon of the Working Group. Following that meeting, the Ministry of Natural Gas Development’s Michelle Schwabe emailed the Working Group members an outline of “next steps,” which included, “change scope from Montney focus to all sweet gas plants irrespective of Basin.” Suddenly, environmental assessments for the Horn River Basin were also in play. The email record shows that Encana was ready with a draft proposal “to address the environmental assessment process for sweet gas plants” only three business days after the Working Group first met. The lead for Encana on the project was Nadia Monaghan, a registered lobbyist for that company. Although the documents provided by the Province show Monaghan’s “co-lead” was Sherry Sian, representing the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), the BC Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists shows Sian was not, at the time of her involvement with the process, a registered lobbyist. Remarkably, Encana’s Monaghan seems to have been given the job of designing the process by which environmental assessments would be reviewed. That was decided at a September 19 meeting between Monaghan and members of the Working Group. Shortly thereafter, Monaghan sent the Working Group a draft “Industry Plan for Gas Plant Environmental Assessment Process Review.” Commenting on Monaghan’s plan, the Ministry of Natural Gas Development’s Michelle Schwabe wrote, “I am not sure we want to be reviewing early drafts unless this is meant to be a more iterative and collaborative process, which personally, I don’t think it needs to be. As we have already done our background work and analysis, I would like to see what CAPP has to bring forward based on their assessment. They just need to get it done.” A week later, the document was returned to Monaghan with minor style changes and a request to her to send back an “updated (polished) version.” The resultant “Environmental Assessment Reform for Natural Gas Processing Plants Joint (Government & Industry) Work Plan” mapped out how the process would proceed. The main steps of the plan were that, first, the gas industry would frame the problem. Next, Monaghan and Sian would give the Working Group a tour of a gas processing plant and a presentation. Thirdly, the gas industry would recommend its preferred solution. Finally, government would weigh in, provide feedback, and then reform options would be recommended to decision makers. Even though the Project Charter had indicated First Nations and “communities” “must be considered throughout the project,” there was no consideration given in Monaghan’s plan for including input from either First Nations or the public, and the record provided by the Province gives no indication anyone in the Working Group expressed qualms about that. As part of the internal discussion between the Province’s participants in the Working Group, they produced a “Decision Note” in October, 2013 for Ministry of Natural Gas Development Deputy Minister Steve Carr, Oil and Gas Commission Commissioner Paul Jeakins, and the Environmental Assessment Office’s Doug Caul. The Decision Note observed that with increased demand for gas resulting from the three LNG projects already in the Environmental Assessment Office’s queue at the time, provincial natural gas production would nearly quadruple. With “26 to 45” new gas processing plants needed to meet that demand, the Working Group foresaw an “80 percent” increase in projects going through environmental assessments. Other reasons for reforming the assessment process, the decision note observed, included shortening the duration of the process, providing greater certainty and transparency for project proponents, and reducing or eliminating duplication between the EAO and the Oil and Gas Commission. The six signatories to the Decision Note recommended “Environmental Assessment change and enhanced Oil and Gas Commission process.” The fine print below that recommendation expanded on what that would mean, but also provided plenty of wiggle room for decision-makers, noting that regulations “could be amended to increase the trigger for sweet gas natural processing facilities from 200 to 400 million cubic feet per day, or removed entirely.” Even so, the main thrust of the recommendation seemed to be that environmental assessments for gas processing plants be shifted to the Oil and Gas Commission. By January, 2014, as laid out in Monaghan’s “Government & Industry” work plan, the industry presented its “preferred solution”: elimination of the volume threshold for natural gas processing plants, exempting all gas plants that fall below the sulphur emissions threshold of two tonnes per day. This would have eliminated assessments for 99 percent of future gas processing plant projects and that’s exactly what Minister Polak announced last April, apparently ignoring the recommendation of the Working Group. You may recall that Polak quickly rescinded the Orders in Council under pressure from First Nations. Fort Nelson First Nation Chief Sharleen Gale famously expelled BC government officials from an LNG conference two days after Polak’s announcement. Gale said, at the time, “No shale gas development will proceed in Fort Nelson First Nation territory until our Nation and our treaty are respected and our concerns about our land and our waters are addressed.” Polak rescinded the Cabinet Orders but made it clear the cabinet’s retreat was only temporary—“until we have undertaken discussions with First Nations.” So the question of whether the Liberal’s legislated requirement to reduce emissions could compete with the fossil-fuel industry’s desire to sell LNG to Asians seems answered: it can’t. It can’t, and not just because Encana gave $891,995 to the Liberal Party between 2005 and 2013. Or because during that same time Encana’s founding CEO Gwyn Morgan gave the Liberals $153,510. Or even because Morgan served as a close adviser to Premier Clark when she took over from former Premier Gordon Campbell. Sure, those factor in, but it runs much deeper than that.The fossil-fuel industry has extended its lobbying tentacles deep into the operational grooves of the Provincial civil service. In those intimate circumstances the industry’s desires become the desires of the government and it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate one from the other. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

September 2014 Decisive moments in the bridge and sewage projects illustrate the need for more politicians willing to work in broad daylight. THE VICTORIA REGION'S TWO LARGEST PUBLIC INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS are in deep trouble. The proposed $800 million sewage treatment program had already cost $90 million by the end of June even though the project didn’t have a site on which a central treatment plant could be built. Of that $90 million, $45 million appears to have gone up in smoke, and three month’s after Environment Minister Mary Polak backed Esquimalt’s right to decline hosting a central treatment plant, there’s no political agreement on how to proceed. Meanwhile, the Johnson Street Bridge replacement project has a new, tentative price tag of $100 million and all indications are it could go much higher. Yet when City of Victoria councillors first voted to replace the current bridge instead of repairing it, they were told the cost of replacement would be $40 million. While proponents for amalgamation have seized on the sewage fiasco as proof that the current system of 13 independent municipalities needs to be streamlined, close examination of decisive moments in each of these projects suggests a simpler solution: election of politicians who commit to conduct the public’s business in broad daylight. THE DECISIVE MOMENT that led inevitably to the current impasse in the sewage treatment program didn’t occur when Esquimalt councillors voted unanimously in April to reject the CRD’s rezoning application for a larger sewage treatment plant than existing zoning allowed. Nor was it the step before that, in July, 2013, when Esquimalt rezoned McLoughlin Point to allow for a sewage treatment plant, but one that would have to be smaller than the CRD wanted. No, the decisive moment was the step before that: At a June 9, 2010 closed meeting of the CRD’s Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee (the sewage committee), directors voted to abandon a four-plant treatment plan, developed over three years, and instead focus all treatment in a single plant at McLoughlin Point. The abandoned plan—which had the approval of then-Minister of Environment Barry Penner—would have shared the burden of hosting sewage treatment between Victoria, Saanich, Esquimalt, and either Colwood or Langford. Instead, over the course of two consecutive closed meetings of the sewage committee, culminating with that June 9 decision, committee directors were convinced to discard fairness and to dump the whole messy business on Esquimalt. This was the moment when the whole enterprise shifted too far away from the political reality that every municipality has its own cultural identity, a right to make decisions about what happens within the borders of that identity, and a legal right to protect that identity. This is (just ask Minister Polak) a more defensible political position than, say, keeping the financial costs for other municipalities in the enterprise to a minimum. This was the moment when the process became too much about engineering and Realpolitik—and too little about respecting existing community richness. It was a vitally important moment that should have been discussed openly—in public. Who said what at that June 9 meeting? What brought about this sudden change in approach? We don’t know, because sewage committee directors also decided that day that the public didn’t have a right to know how, or why, they voted the way they did. Officially, the meeting was closed to the public because it included “negotiations and related discussions respecting the proposed provision of a municipal service that are at their preliminary stages and that, in the view of the [directors], could reasonably be expected to harm the interests of the [CRD] if they were held in public.” Committee directors didn’t have to follow the staff recommendation to close the meeting, but the majority of them did. Elected public officials in BC are required by the Community Charter to keep confidential everything said at a meeting closed to the public unless a majority agree to “rise and report” on that meeting. Even when that happens, the “report” provided to the public usually acknowledges little more than the course of action decided upon. The arguments for or against that course of action are normally excluded from that report. This is what happened at that decisive June 9 meeting. The minutes show that after an 85-minute closed session, the committee “rose and reported” that staff had been directed to pursue consolidation of all liquid waste treatment at McLoughlin Point. The minutes provide no indication of why that change was made. Considering that $45 million in public money appears to have been wasted as a direct result of that decision, the lack of transparency is disturbing. It’s as though the information required for holding politicians and public servants accountable for their decisions has disappeared into a black hole. The staff report (obtained by an FOI request) given to sewage committee directors at that meeting showed the recommendation for a centralized system was made by Tony Brcic, the CRD’s project manager for the wastewater treatment program, and Jack Hull, the general manager of the CRD’s Integrated Water Services. So Focus filed another FOI request for all emails and reports exchanged between the CRD’s Chief Administrative Officer Kelly Daniels, Hull and Brcic between April 1 and June 9, 2010, that related to the recommendation to CRD directors to shift from a four-plant configuration to one central plant at McLoughlin Point. The record provided by the CRD shows no bolt of lightning striking project managers, urging them toward a central plant at McLoughlin Point. For example, the record shows no demand from either the Province or the federal government that tied supportive funding to a single, central plant. Instead, a picture of chaotic, last-minute planning emerges from the record. Three weeks before committee directors voted to move all treatment to Esquimalt, Daniels emailed private engineering consultant Jonathan Huggett. Daniels told Huggett, “The CRD has submitted the Business Case and Amendment #7 for the [Liquid Waste Management Plan] in application for approval and funding for a Waste Water Treatment System that includes four treatment plants and a bio-solids processing facility. Work continues to proceed on finding alternate site locations for all these facilities with the expectation that we may see significant reductions in the overall capital and operating costs of the system, particularly if we can consolidate the treatment facilities to one treatment plant site as recommended by the Peer Review Committee.” In that last sentence Daniels was referring to a report required by the CRD’s funding agreement with the Province. It appears Daniels was under the impression the Peer Review Committee had recommended consolidation to one treatment plant. If so, he didn’t have it quite right. The Peer Review Committee strongly recommended that the CRD try to secure an Upper Harbour site from Steel Pacific, because that site would have been large enough to accommodate a single, central plant including digesters for processing solids. McLoughlin Point was not large enough for digesters. Negotiations with Steel Pacific were ongoing. The FOI record provided shows the CRD was considering a price of $42 million. The possibility of acquiring that property seems to have tipped the whole planning process toward a central site. Yet no peer review report had ever recommended McLoughlin Point as an appropriate location for a single central plant. Indeed, a May 2009 peer review report on the CRD’s four-plant treatment plan had repeatedly raised “serious reservations” about McLoughlin Point, even though the CRD was proposing a plant with considerably smaller hydraulic capacity than would be required by a single central plant. For example, that review listed nine “concerns and restraints” with the McLoughlin site that included technical problems likely to arise from the site’s “extremely small” size, the necessity for “full buildout to the fenceline,” the likelihood of the need for lengthy and expensive site remediation, and the prominent visibility of the site “from the water as well as from the cruise ship wharves and heliport terminal on Ogden Point across the harbour entrance to the east.” The peer reviewers concluded, “In view of the concerns and constraints expressed above, the [Peer Review Team] has serious reservations about the McLoughlin site. Resolving these issues will entail a major and possibly prolonged effort. Before proceeding too far down the path of trying to resolve these issues, it would be prudent to ensure that the facilities currently proposed for the McLoughlin site…can indeed be accommodated by the site in a reasonable and satisfactory manner.” Yet even while negotiations on the Steel Pacific site continued, Hull and Brcic were advancing their planning for a central plant at McLoughlin. What seems clear is that senior project managers weren’t reading, thoroughly, the reports taxpayers were funding. Instead, as Daniels put it to Huggett, the managers were focussed on “reductions in the overall capital and operating costs of the system…” A week after Daniels wrote Huggett, on May 27, Hull emailed Daniels and reported that he had reconfigured the McLoughlin plant to a larger size—including a “little” encroachment on DND lands—and had replaced the Saanich East-North Oak Bay plant with a storage tank. Hull added, “Digesters would still be at Hartland although we can look for a closer site. Cost estimate expected tomorrow but expect total to be less than $800 million.” The very next day Hull emailed Daniels: “As it looks like Esquimalt is the likely plant location, I’m going to try to meet with Bev DeJardin [sic] to give her a ‘heads up’ before she reads about [it] in the agenda package.” Daniels quickly replied: “Good luck with that!!” Hull, apparently unaware of how to spell Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins’ name, similarly seemed to have no notion of the complex chain of political reactions the reconfiguration was destined to unleash. The rest is history. Without any public consultation with Esquimalt residents beforehand, a majority of sewage committee directors voted to approve a centralized plant at McLoughlin Point, thus eliminating a crucial political compromise—a more equitable distribution of the burden of hosting sewage treatment. By the end of that June the new plan was sitting on Minister Penner’s desk awaiting his approval. A few weeks later, the CRD’s public consultation with Desjardins’ community took the form of two open houses. If Brcic’s and Hull’s recommendation and verbal reports had been delivered to a public meeting, and committee directors’ comments and questions were forever immortalized on websites and in print, you can be certain every word would have been turned over and over and checked for veracity against the known record, including what the Peer Review Committee had actually reported to the CRD. There would have been the possibility of quickly holding these public officials accountable for their decisions. Instead, the people elected to protect the public interest allowed Brcic, Hull and Daniels to proceed down the McLoughlin path as far as they could go, burning through $45 million as they went, before finally being brought to a halt by “Bev DeJardin.” THE GRAVE RISK TO TAXPAYERS of important decisions being made at closed meetings is even more evident in the case of a November 16, 2012 meeting of Victoria City councillors. I have written about this previously, but there have been developments, as they say. Three bid proposals to build a replacement for the Johnson Street Bridge were received by the City of Victoria on November 1, 2012. Two weeks later, City councillors were summoned to a closed meeting and were given a report that recommended councillors authorize City staff to begin negotiation of a “fixed-price contract” to build the new bridge with PCL Constructors Westcoast. Without seeing any of the bids, the majority of councillors went along with that recommendation and, on New Years eve, they authorized City staff to sign a contract with PCL. But this past spring councillors were told PCL had submitted a change order asking for an additional $7.9 million and five and a half months of extra time to complete the project. What happened to the City’s “fixed-price contract” that, as Mayor Dean Fortin had promised, would protect the taxpayer? To answer that question the City then brought in engineering consultant Jonathan Huggett—yes, the same Jonathan Huggett mentioned above—to advise the City on future risks it faced with the project. Huggett delivered his report to councillors on July 24. At the same time, the City released details of PCL’s request. The City also released a response from MMM Group—the City’s project manager—to PCL’s claim for more time and money. MMM rejected PCL’s change order, claiming PCL knew back in November, 2012, when it submitted its bid proposal, that its changes to the design were so extensive that it should have allowed a 30 percent contingency in its pricing rather than the four percent contingency it used. At that July 24 meeting, Huggett told councillors they should expect to pay more if they wanted the project to get built. How much more he wouldn’t say, but he warned that PCL’s $7.9 million change order was likely not the last request for more money. Huggett committed to providing councillors, in September, a more complete estimate of how much additional money and time it will take to complete the bridge. Now let’s go back to that November 16, 2012 closed meeting. Following a few months of Focus fighting with the City for the record of what happened at that meeting, Victoria councillors “rose and reported” and a slightly redacted version of the minutes and staff report from that meeting were released to us. I’ll focus on just one issue that arises from those minutes that relates to the current dispute between the City and PCL: the contingency. At that November 16 meeting, the minutes show, at least one councillor was concerned about the tiny four percent contingency included in PCL’s bid proposal. Shouldn’t it have been higher? City engineering staff told councillors that the tiny contingency was “normal” for the stage the project was at. Councillors were also told, “This is a unique project, that is why the contingency is different.” In the privacy of a locked room, councillors were given seriously flawed advice by City staff. Don’t take my word for it; listen to what MMM Group said about the contingency issue in its refutation of PCL’s change order request for more money, released on July 24. MMM wrote that PCL’s design “was not more than 10 percent complete at the time of PCL’s [bid] proposal submission and it appears that PCL calculated quantities either from their optimized design without considering any contingencies, or from [our] design. In either case, this would lead to a significant error in their bid.” MMM went on to suggest that a 30 percent contingency would have been more appropriate. So let’s just review that. At that closed meeting in November 2012, councillors were advised by staff that a four percent contingency was “normal.” But now we know, thanks to MMM Group, that the contingency should have been 30 percent. Where did City staff get the idea that a four percent contingency was normal? And why did councillors believe them? For the answers to those questions we need to look at the minutes of the closed meeting at which City of Victoria staff recommended that councillors approve signing a “fixed-price contract” with PCL. That meeting took place on December 31, 2012. City councillors recently preempted our efforts to obtain the staff report and minutes from that closed meeting by, again, rising and reporting. That staff report stated: “The City’s Consultant, MMM Group, has reviewed the contract documents prepared by FMC and the City, including optimizations, contingency, project risks and the value engineering opportunities, and in their professional opinion recommend that the City proceed with the project and enter into a contract with PCL Westcoast.” I’ve added the emphasis to the word “contingency.” FMC, by the way, was the City’s legal adviser on the procurement. So MMM gave its blessing to the tiny four percent contingency on December 31, 2012, even though it now says that a more appropriate contingency would have been 30 percent. If a 30 percent contingency had been used, however, the City would have been looking at an overall project cost of $109 million, far above its “affordability ceiling” of $92.8 million. In other words, the project would have died, and along with it the $9.1 million contract MMM had inked with the City—just before councillors were encouraged to approve negotiations with PCL. Perhaps it wasn’t in MMM’s best interest back then to provide the City with its opinion that the contingency should have been 30 percent instead of four percent. But it seems to be now. Had City staff known that the basics of PCL’s bid proposal would be exposed to an open, public meeting, rather than to a group of councillors who, politically, couldn’t afford the project to fail, would City taxpayers now be facing a $110 million bill for the bridge? And would councillors, labouring under the scrutiny of retired engineers and would-be councillors, have been more prudent and less gullible? For the record, only councillors Lisa Helps and Ben Isitt voted against signing the contract with PCL. A BROWSE THROUGH the minutes of past meetings of the City of Victoria or the CRD quickly reveals the extent to which the public’s business is increasingly conducted in private. And, as these two cases illustrate, there’s a brutally high price to pay for this lack of transparency and accountability. Information is power, and those having power are generally reluctant to share it. With a civic election on the horizon there isn’t a better time to demand fuller transparency. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

July 2014 Are City of Victoria taxpayers getting ripped off by seismic sleight-of-hand on the new Johnson Street Bridge project? BY JULY 7, the City of Victoria should have released details on the 6-month schedule delay and $7.9 million change order claimed in February by PCL, the company building the new Johnson Street Bridge. Focus filed an FOI for that change order in April. The City refused to release the record to us, invoking a section of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act that allows them to withhold a record that they intend to release to the public within 60 working days. The City must now release the change order by July 7. So watch for it. What we can tell you from other documents obtained by Focus through FOI is that the City’s committee of senior staff monitoring the project knew by mid-December, 2013 that a dispute with PCL was emerging. Councillors were informed in late March and the public learned of it at an April 10 council meeting. At that meeting City Manager Jason Johnson referred to this as “putting the information out early.” In late May, the City’s project manager MMM Group said it didn’t think the City should entertain PCL’s claims. The City has been silent on the matter since. During that April 10 council meeting, City of Victoria Director of Engineering and Public Works Dwayne Kalynchuk told councillors PCL’s claim for more money was based on “design delay” and “scope growth.” He offered no further elaboration. But the following day, during a CFAX Radio interview with Terry Moore, Kalynchuk linked PCL’s claim for more money and time to changes that were needed to “beef up” certain elements of the bridge design following “seismic analyses.” Kalynchuk’s choice of venue to make this announcement was peculiar given an exchange that occurred at the previous day’s council meeting. Councillor Lisa Helps had asked a question about what engineers expected would happen to the bridge in a big earthquake. The lifting part of the bridge is balanced on top of 24 steel rollers. There’s nothing attaching the lifting span to the substructure. This is like a house sitting on a concrete foundation with no anchor bolts to prevent the house from bouncing off the foundation during an earthquake. Helps asked, “Could the bridge be knocked off its rollers in ‘the big one’?” In response, a Hardesty & Hanover engineer (MMM subcontracted the design of the bascule span to the New York engineering firm Hardesty & Hanover) acknowledged that a “full seismic analysis” of the design had been done, but his answer didn’t include the words “No, the bridge will not be knocked off its rollers.” The engineer said the bridge had been designed as a “Critical Bridge” and as such, “Collapse of the bridge is not permissible. There may be damage to elements of the bridge that will limit operation for a short period of time but its traffic carrying capacity will not be impeded after a seismic event.” Helps didn’t know it but the engineer’s description of the expected level of service after “the big one” for a “Critical Bridge” wasn’t accurate. A more accurate description of the seismic performance expected for this “Critical Bridge” is contained in a document prepared by MMM in 2012, Johnson Street Bridge: Seismic Design Criteria. That document notes that after a “Cascadia subduction event,” otherwise known as “the big one,” bridge service would be “Significantly limited; limited access to emergency traffic is possible within days of the earthquake. Full access to public may resume in several weeks to months.” That’s quite different than “its traffic carrying capacity will not be impeded after a seismic event,” as Helps was told. More importantly, MMM’s criteria are a lower standard than City officials requested in 2010, when they told electors before a borrowing referendum that the new bridge would be built to "the highest standard of earthquake protection." In the lead up to the referendum, Councillors insisted the bridge should have uninterrupted access for emergency vehicles after “the big one”—that's the highest standard. After all, what good would access for fire trucks, ambulances and emergency rescue vehicles be if it takes “days” to provide that access? Fire would already have destroyed buildings and people trapped under rubble would already have died from their injuries if it took "days" to get emergency equipment to the scene. That's what councillors argued in 2010 when they imposed this condition on both a new bridge and a rehabilitation of the current bridge. MMM didn’t tell councillors that their request for "the highest standard" was unreasonable, MMM simply said that level of seismic performance would cost more money: $10 million more. They even said a lower standard, the one adopted by the Province in its seismic retrofit program, was "not recommended." So City councillors of the day voted to pay $10 million extra for that level of public safety. Now, taxpayers are paying for it, but they’re not getting it. Following the engineer’s response to Councillor Helps, the councillor asked if that seismic analysis could be made public. Kalynchuk said, “I believe that information has been requested under freedom of information and has been released.” Mayor Fortin prompted Kalynchuk: “And posted to our website?” Kalynchuk provided a reassuring response: “Oooh, it’s binders of material, so I’m not sure that’s available. We’ll see if there’s a summary that can be posted.” Kalynchuk didn’t say, “Oh, and by the way, the $7.9 million and 6-month delay were the result of the bridge design failing one or more seismic analyses.” Instead, he waited until he was safely in Terry Moore’s studio the next day to make that connection. As it turns out, Kalynchuk’s “binders of material” didn’t exist. Focus had requested the seismic assessment of the new design last November and the City had told us it had no such documents in its possession. Following Kalynchuk’s answers to Helps and Fortin, we filed a second FOI for the “binders of material” Kalynchuk had referred to. The City again responded that they could find no such record. I then emailed Kalynchuk and asked him about those “binders of material,” and inquired as to whether he’d ever seen the seismic analysis. Kalynchuk responded, “…the staff from [Hardesty & Hanover] stated at their April presentation a full seismic review was conducted on the bridge. While I assumed some data was provided to the City, this was incorrect.” Since the new bridge was originally justified on the basis of the seismic risk associated with the old bridge, this seemed like an issue City officials would make sure they understood as fully as possible. I asked Kalynchuk, the senior City engineer overseeing the project on the public’s behalf, if he perhaps ought to have reviewed the seismic assessment for the new bridge before construction began, or at least before fabrication of the bascule span commenced. Kalynchuk replied, “…it is the responsibility of [MMM] to assure the project is delivered in accordance with project specifications which includes seismic. As stated, [Hardesty & Hanover] have undertaken a full seismic assessment to assure the final product meets the specs. Upon completion of the job they will be required to provide letters of assurance to certify construction meets the specs and design. With respect to the seismic analyses, it is not expected that the detailed data would be provided to us as we are not structural engineers and probably would not understand it. We will rely on [MMM] to provide full letters of assurance.” Is Kalynchuk’s faith in MMM warranted? MMM's design, which it claimed in 2010 was “tried, tested and proven,” has undergone two major redesigns since. The two other companies that bid on the contract to build the bridge both declined to use MMM's design. One sited the design's apparent seismic vulnerability. When a version of the design finally made it through to a seismic analysis, it apparently failed. Kalynchuk can’t know how many times it failed, or if it ever actually passed—he’s never seen the analyses. MMM have never publicly acknowledged that its design will not be built to "the highest standard of earthquake protection." The “design delay” all this hidden seismic analysis caused appears to be substantial. The contract between PCL and the City stipulated that MMM’s design would be completed, and advanced drawings provided to PCL, by May 20, 2013. But a revised project schedule delivered to the City by PCL last February (and obtained by FOI) shows that design work for the bascule span wasn’t expected to be completed until May 8, 2014. On the political side, Fortin has maintained the City has a “fixed-price contract” with PCL and doesn’t intend to pay one penny more. But is it a fixed-price contract? City officials may have misled the mayor and councillors in November 2012 when they said PCL had requested no amendments to the City’s draft contract. PCL’s bid proposal had indeed suggested amendments to the contract, although the City has refused to disclose the exact nature of those suggestions. But a copy of the draft contract, obtained by Focus through FOI, shows substantial additional terms were included in the final contract the City signed with PCL. In the section covering “Changes,” for example, a clause was added that created a “Schedule of Prices”—an extensive list of possible sources of changes and an “allocated contingency” for each. Perhaps the mayor and councillors thought all possibilities were covered in that list. Unfortunately for City taxpayers, neither “design delay” or “scope growth” are included on that list and $7.9 million is over three times as much as the project’s entire completion contingency. That doesn’t mean the City won’t have to pay the $7.9 million. It means that the City must determine where the money will come from. Whether they will determine that in or out of court may become clearer after July 7. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

June 2014 Esquimalt shoots CRD in foot. Now what? FOLLOWING THE CRD'S APPEAL to Environment Minister Mary Polak to intervene in the “impasse” between Esquimalt and the CRD on amending zoning to allow for a larger sewage treatment plant at McLoughlin Point, Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins wrote her own letter. Desjardins asked Polak to “decline the CRD’s request.” Her 12-page letter, supported by an 11-page legal submission, had the unmistakable heft of a well-considered battle plan. The CRD’s appeal to Polak had argued that section 37 of the Environmental Management Act (EMA) provided the minister with authority to override Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its zoning of McLoughlin Point that allows for sewage treatment but limits site coverage and building height. It would appear the CRD made the mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Since the EMA was enacted in 2003, section 37 has never been invoked by an environment minister. For Polak to do so now would risk a legal test of the Act, with no certain outcome. A careful reading of the legal submission accompanying Desjardins’ letter leaves the distinct impression Esquimalt’s strategy to protect itself from becoming the septic tank for the entire region is well-founded in legal precedent. The Act says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that if a “conflict” arises between existing zoning and the requirements of the Act, the Act trumps the zoning. But the Act also says, “a conflict does not exist solely because further restrictions or conditions are imposed…unless the minister by order declares that a conflict exists.” Desjardins’ letter argued that, “In law, there is no ‘conflict’ on land use; there is no impossibility of dual compliance.” The mayor’s logic is compelling: The CRD’s McLoughlin property is already zoned for sewage treatment—Esquimalt defined that zoning in 2013. The CRD could proceed with a treatment project there if it accepted the restrictions of Esquimalt’s existing zoning. Esquimalt’s refusal to allow the greater site coverage and higher buildings closer to the waterfront that the CRD wants does not prevent the CRD from using McLoughlin Point to meet some of its obligations under the Act to provide sewage treatment. So Polak should not intervene. That’s the mayor’s logic. In its letter to Polak the CRD included a compilation of its objections to the conditions imposed by Esquimalt’s 2013 zoning bylaw. The most significant of these related to building height and siting requirements that, the CRD stated, “would severely limit the capacity” of a treatment plant constructed on the site. That, in turn, would necessitate “construction of a second [plant] at substantial cost to taxpayers.” This is really the most compelling element of the CRD’s argument, and that claim requires careful, arithmetical examination. After all, the CRD’s credibility on this file has been badly strained. How could the CRD, for example, spend $47 million in public funds on a plan that depended on locating a large, potentially foul-smelling industrial building at the entrance to Victoria Harbour and somehow overlook that ordinary setbacks and height restrictions would be applied by Esquimalt? Desjardins directly countered the CRD’s claim that Polak should intervene because Esquimalt’s application of setbacks and height restrictions could cause greater expense to taxpayers. She told Polak, “CRD’s submission claims there will be increased costs, but that is not a legitimate legal basis to override legitimate local zoning.” Indeed, section 37 has nothing to say about “cost,” just “conditions,” so it’s possible Esquimalt would take the minister to court for imposing the McLoughlin plant on them on the basis of “cost to taxpayers.” But for the average taxpayer, this is a critical consideration. Is Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its rezoning going to cost taxpayers more money? This is a much more complex question than the CRD is implying, and finding anything more than a superficial answer requires looking back at what the CRD has said about costs in the past and then doing a little arithmetic. Back in the spring of 2010, the CRD was promoting a four-plant configuration that, it said, would cost $942 million and provide 124 million litres per day of treatment capacity. That cost was validated by Ernst & Young, which, several months later, similarly validated the $830 million cost of the 108-million-litres-per-day plant that the CRD now wants to build at McLoughlin (both estimates were done by Stantec). Whether either of these dollar figures are an accurate reflection of likely costs is an open question, but their relative values are likely credible. And that allows us to make a comparison of value for money. The point of that approach is to determine which option is the most efficient and effective use of tax dollars. The four-plant configuration works out to $7.60 per litre of treatment capacity; the one-plant configuration $7.67. On that basis, taxpayers would be getting a better deal with the four-plant configuration if the extra capacity could be arithmetically justified. Actually, the CRD has already done that justification and that received the blessing of the Minister of Environment. In Amendment 7 of its Liquid Waste Management Plan, the CRD used a set of population projections to justify their proposal for a 124-million-litres-per-day 4-plant treatment configuration. In Amendment 8, they used the same population projections to justify a lower-capacity single-plant configuration at McLoughlin. But this is arithmetically illogical and raises two questions: Did the consolidation to a one-plant system create a plan that lacks capacity for future growth? Would the CRD’s choice of a one-plant configuration at McLoughlin require construction of a second plant sooner than the CRD is admitting? I’ll come back to these questions in a moment. First, it’s likely Minister Polak, or her aides, will notice that the size of the plant the CRD was proposing for McLoughlin Point in early 2010 was only 40 percent of what the CRD now wants Polak to force upon Esquimalt. That 2010 plant would have fit within the building setbacks and height restrictions Esquimalt’s zoning has since imposed. There would have been no conflict. Going back to the question of whether the CRD’s current plan would provide adequate capacity for future growth, comparison with other treatment projects in British Columbia is illuminating. In North Vancouver, the Lions Gate Secondary Wastewater Treatment Plant produced its project definition report last February. Like the CRD’s project, Lions Gate will be built to meet new federal regulations requiring a minimum of secondary treatment by 2020. Its design capacity is just five percent smaller than the capacity proposed for McLoughlin Point. Yet there’s a remarkable difference between the two. By the time Lions Gate reaches its full capacity around 2050, it will be serving a residential population of 254,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. The CRD says that the marginally-larger McLoughlin plant will be able to serve a residential population of 342,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. Why is there such a dramatic difference in the per capita capacity provision for Victoria and North Vancouver? When McLoughlin’s treatment capacity is compared with Kelowna’s, there’s a similarly large per capita difference in the capacity being provided. Tellingly, Kelowna and Lions Gate have allowed for almost identical per capita capacity. Comparison of the physical sizes of the sites that will be used by Victoria, Kelowna and Lions Gate point to the cause. Kelowna’s plant is located on nine hectares, Lions Gate on three hectares. The McLoughlin Point site, which will serve the largest population of the three, is only 1.4 hectares in size. It’s that small size that limited the treatment capacity the CRD could build there. The risk to taxpayers in this situation is that the CRD’s shift from a four-plant configuration to putting all treatment at McLoughlin wasn’t based on a careful assessment of the regions’s predictable treatment needs or a value for money approach to the problem. The CRD has created a situation where construction of a second plant at substantial cost to taxpayers may be right around the corner—the very same result the CRD says would follow having to build a smaller plant at McLoughlin. Why did the CRD’s plan for four plants shift to just one large one? In June of 2010, CRD directors were told the consolidation to a central site was necessary to ensure federal funding. But the timing of this shift suggests local political considerations may have also played a part. The four-plant configuration was dumped soon after CRD staff experienced hostile encounters with residents of Saanich East-North Oak Bay in the spring of 2010 during public consultation on the CRD’s plan to locate a treatment plant in Haro Woods. At least one indignant Saanich resident told the CRD that, if it went ahead with its plan, he would sue them if he detected so much as a “whiff” of sewage. A CRD report on that consultation noted, “Throughout the public events, CRD staff witnessed a high degree of aggressiveness and distress amongst some participants. CRD staff will look to incorporate best practices in future public processes which discourage these types of behaviours. This [is] to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and share their own views in a neutral and safe environment.” In fact, the Haro Woods encounters were the last any member of the public saw of CRD staff before the sudden announcement that all treatment would take place in Esquimalt. No consultation took place with Esquimalt residents before that consolidation, even though the Environmental Management Act explicitly required the CRD to do so. Esquimalt has been fighting back ever since. Was a super-sized McLoughlin plant a quick fix for Saanich politicians fearful of blow-back from well-heeled constituents, rather than a reasoned approach to providing the most cost effective treatment solution over the long term? This was the moment when the CRD’s plan began its slow-motion derailment. That Esquimalt might rezone to suit its preferences ought to have occurred to CRD officers and directors back then, but if it did, they seemed to have misjudged the relief that might be provided by section 37. Desjardins captured this in her letter to Polak when she reminded the Minister that as recently as April 24 at a CRD board meeting, CRD CEO Robert Lapham stated the CRD “isn’t obligated to rezone the property.” Desjardins wrote, “[Lapham] asks Mr Hull—an engineer, not a lawyer—for the reference to the Act that states that. There is no Act that states that.” Desjardins letter provided the Minister with a full transcript of Lapham’s halting, apparently confused grasp of the CRD’s unsupportable position. Desjardins told Polak the “CRD’s attack on the Township Zoning Bylaw is incorrect in law, internally inconsistent, and hypocritical…The CRD’s assertions are more argument than they are settled law. If there is a proper legal argument to be made regarding municipal zoning, the CRD can and should make it in Court.” Pointing to a way out of the “impasse,” Desjardins told Polak, “CRD’s assessments of the appropriate models of sewage treatment and sites are dated and were made on cost assumptions that have proven to be incorrect. There is other evidence to suggest decentralized systems can be built for less cost.” Desjardins and her councillors have already moved to distance them from the CRD’s “dated” models. They’ve joined forces with Cascadia Green Building Council and have launched the “Esquimalt Village Living Community Design Competition.” This is intended to be an “international design competition” that “strives to craft a 21st Century sewage treatment solution for Esquimalt that can also be used as a model for the entire region,” according to a Cascadia press release. In the release, Cascadia’s Neville Grigg noted, “The design competition incorporates sewage treatment into the heart of the community as a source of water, heat and energy which will offer a sustainable, competitive advantage for Esquimalt.” I asked Desjardins if she would support a reworked regional treatment plan based on the CRD’s 2010 four-plant configuration, with either a much smaller plant at McLoughlin or one located in the Esquimalt Village centre. “The best value may not be McLoughlin at all,” she said, “because there’s nowhere at McLoughlin where resources can be utilized at their highest value.” Desjardins added, “That’s partly why Cascadia is looking at the opportunity in the Esquimalt Village project, because it will have new development very close which can hook in almost immediately. The use of the heat and energy coming out of the treatment centre for public buildings in the area is substantial.” Desjardins said Esquimalt would consider including Vic West and View Royal in the Village treatment plant. I asked Desjardins a second time if she could see supporting a smaller plant at McLoughlin as part of a regional system. “Here’s my real problem with McLoughlin,” she said. “Not only would it not be the best use but you haven’t taken into consideration the biggest concern: Why would we put that infrastructure right at the entrance to the harbour—and why would we put it in a tsunami zone? Can you fit the plant into the provincial guidelines that advise setbacks of 15 metres? Why would we put a plant in harm’s way? We know that climate change is causing rising sea level. During Hurricane Sandy, all of the big plants went down; none of the distributed systems went down. All those things are saying ‘Don’t do it.’” Esquimalt’s and Desjardins’ position are supported by a large number of regional citizens who the CRD has bluntly labelled “the opposition.” One such thorn in the CRD’s side is the Sewage Treatment Action Group (STAG). Over the past several months STAG has developed information about an alternative to the CRD’s one-plant configuration that would see construction of a number of distributed tertiary treatment plants. I reported here last month on STAG Director Richard Atwell’s research that showed the CRD has been cherry-picking costs from different studies, depending on which would make tertiary distributed look the most expensive and the one-plant configuration look the least costly. The CRD insists a study done for it in 2009 showed an 11-plant distributed model would cost “$2 billion.” (The study actually put the cost at $1.85 billion.) Atwell’s research also suggested that a distributed tertiary model based on the building concept and treatment technology used at Lighthouse Point Water Reclamation Facility in Blaine, Washington, if applied to Victoria, would cost far less than the CRD’s “$2 billion.” This doesn’t seem to be fully supported by the numbers. Blaine’s Public Works Director Ravyn Whitewolf told Focus the Lighthouse Point project cost $36 million, including engineering, construction and construction management costs. That figure didn’t include conveyancing to and from the plant, or an outfall.The facility uses membrane bioreactor technology like Dockside Green’s and produces water than can be reused for agriculture. The facility bears little resemblance to the industrial-looking buildings most of us associate with public works projects. Whitewolf, a professional engineer, said the plant was designed for a maximum Average Dry Weather Flow (ADWF) of 3.4 million litres per day. BC’s municipal sewage regulations require treatment plants to be capable of treating twice the measured ADWF to secondary standards. The McLoughlin plant, for example, was designed for an ADWF of 108 million litres per day, but would have been capable of secondary treatment of 216 million litres per day. To treat that amount of sewage would require 63 Blaine-size plants. At $36 million a pop, 63 plants would cost $2.3 billion. This is, of course, just an arithmetical exercise. When the CRD’s consultants designed the aforementioned four-plant configuration, the plant to be located in Haro Woods was designated for tertiary treatment and the design capacity for that plant was set at 1.75 times ADWF. If that reduction in treatment capacity was permitted by the Province across the system, only 56 Blaine-size plants would be needed. At $36 million a pop, 56 plants would cost $2.0 billion. If that last calculation is done for the current ADWF rather than for the capacity of the proposed McLoughlin Point system, 43 Blaine-size plants and $1.5 billion would be required. With this scenario, there would be no cost for unused capacity. More capacity could be added as required. All of the above assumes Blaine-sized plants. There would doubtless be savings by doubling or tripling the size of plants. But one of the attractions of the Blaine model is that its human-scale architecture would allow it to be located just about anywhere. To obtain economy of scale the physical size of the plants would need to increase. Whether that enlargement would start to erode the very attributes that would make such small plants easy to integrate into the city’s neighbourhoods is an open question. But that scaling up could make it politically difficult—if not impossible—to locate so many facilities that resemble, say, firehalls, into the community. Again, this is just an arithmetical exercise, and additional subtractions, multiplications and consideration of technical nuances are necessary for a clearer understanding of the real potential for alternative models so they can be properly compared with the CRD’s plan. In an election year, CRD politicians might want to consider doing that instead of twisting Minister Polak’s arm. In the article that follows this, Katherine Palmer Gordon relates what two scientists have to offer on this issue. One of them, Dr Chris Garrett, tells Palmer Gordon: “I’m not necessarily anti-sewage treatment, I’m pro-arithmetic.” Precisely. UPDATE On May 27, 2014, BC Environment Minister Mary Polak announced that she would not override Esquimalt's zoning. The Minister's announcement is here, the CRD's subsequent announcement here, and the Township of Esquimalt's response is here. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

June 2014 Esquimalt shoots CRD in foot. Now what? FOLLOWING THE CRD'S APPEAL to Environment Minister Mary Polak to intervene in the “impasse” between Esquimalt and the CRD on amending zoning to allow for a larger sewage treatment plant at McLoughlin Point, Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins wrote her own letter. Desjardins asked Polak to “decline the CRD’s request.” Her 12-page letter, supported by an 11-page legal submission, had the unmistakable heft of a well-considered battle plan. The CRD’s appeal to Polak had argued that section 37 of the Environmental Management Act (EMA) provided the minister with authority to override Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its zoning of McLoughlin Point that allows for sewage treatment but limits site coverage and building height. It would appear the CRD made the mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight. Since the EMA was enacted in 2003, section 37 has never been invoked by an environment minister. For Polak to do so now would risk a legal test of the Act, with no certain outcome. A careful reading of the legal submission accompanying Desjardins’ letter leaves the distinct impression Esquimalt’s strategy to protect itself from becoming the septic tank for the entire region is well-founded in legal precedent. The Act says, and I’m paraphrasing here, that if a “conflict” arises between existing zoning and the requirements of the Act, the Act trumps the zoning. But the Act also says, “a conflict does not exist solely because further restrictions or conditions are imposed…unless the minister by order declares that a conflict exists.” Desjardins’ letter argued that, “In law, there is no ‘conflict’ on land use; there is no impossibility of dual compliance.” The mayor’s logic is compelling: The CRD’s McLoughlin property is already zoned for sewage treatment—Esquimalt defined that zoning in 2013. The CRD could proceed with a treatment project there if it accepted the restrictions of Esquimalt’s existing zoning. Esquimalt’s refusal to allow the greater site coverage and higher buildings closer to the waterfront that the CRD wants does not prevent the CRD from using McLoughlin Point to meet some of its obligations under the Act to provide sewage treatment. So Polak should not intervene. That’s the mayor’s logic. In its letter to Polak the CRD included a compilation of its objections to the conditions imposed by Esquimalt’s 2013 zoning bylaw. The most significant of these related to building height and siting requirements that, the CRD stated, “would severely limit the capacity” of a treatment plant constructed on the site. That, in turn, would necessitate “construction of a second [plant] at substantial cost to taxpayers.” This is really the most compelling element of the CRD’s argument, and that claim requires careful, arithmetical examination. After all, the CRD’s credibility on this file has been badly strained. How could the CRD, for example, spend $47 million in public funds on a plan that depended on locating a large, potentially foul-smelling industrial building at the entrance to Victoria Harbour and somehow overlook that ordinary setbacks and height restrictions would be applied by Esquimalt? Desjardins directly countered the CRD’s claim that Polak should intervene because Esquimalt’s application of setbacks and height restrictions could cause greater expense to taxpayers. She told Polak, “CRD’s submission claims there will be increased costs, but that is not a legitimate legal basis to override legitimate local zoning.” Indeed, section 37 has nothing to say about “cost,” just “conditions,” so it’s possible Esquimalt would take the minister to court for imposing the McLoughlin plant on them on the basis of “cost to taxpayers.” But for the average taxpayer, this is a critical consideration. Is Esquimalt’s refusal to amend its rezoning going to cost taxpayers more money? This is a much more complex question than the CRD is implying, and finding anything more than a superficial answer requires looking back at what the CRD has said about costs in the past and then doing a little arithmetic. Back in the spring of 2010, the CRD was promoting a four-plant configuration that, it said, would cost $942 million and provide 124 million litres per day of treatment capacity. That cost was validated by Ernst & Young, which, several months later, similarly validated the $830 million cost of the 108-million-litres-per-day plant that the CRD now wants to build at McLoughlin (both estimates were done by Stantec). Whether either of these dollar figures are an accurate reflection of likely costs is an open question, but their relative values are likely credible. And that allows us to make a comparison of value for money. The point of that approach is to determine which option is the most efficient and effective use of tax dollars. The four-plant configuration works out to $7.60 per litre of treatment capacity; the one-plant configuration $7.67. On that basis, taxpayers would be getting a better deal with the four-plant configuration if the extra capacity could be arithmetically justified. Actually, the CRD has already done that justification and that received the blessing of the Minister of Environment. In Amendment 7 of its Liquid Waste Management Plan, the CRD used a set of population projections to justify their proposal for a 124-million-litres-per-day 4-plant treatment configuration. In Amendment 8, they used the same population projections to justify a lower-capacity single-plant configuration at McLoughlin. But this is arithmetically illogical and raises two questions: Did the consolidation to a one-plant system create a plan that lacks capacity for future growth? Would the CRD’s choice of a one-plant configuration at McLoughlin require construction of a second plant sooner than the CRD is admitting? I’ll come back to these questions in a moment. First, it’s likely Minister Polak, or her aides, will notice that the size of the plant the CRD was proposing for McLoughlin Point in early 2010 was only 40 percent of what the CRD now wants Polak to force upon Esquimalt. That 2010 plant would have fit within the building setbacks and height restrictions Esquimalt’s zoning has since imposed. There would have been no conflict. Going back to the question of whether the CRD’s current plan would provide adequate capacity for future growth, comparison with other treatment projects in British Columbia is illuminating. In North Vancouver, the Lions Gate Secondary Wastewater Treatment Plant produced its project definition report last February. Like the CRD’s project, Lions Gate will be built to meet new federal regulations requiring a minimum of secondary treatment by 2020. Its design capacity is just five percent smaller than the capacity proposed for McLoughlin Point. Yet there’s a remarkable difference between the two. By the time Lions Gate reaches its full capacity around 2050, it will be serving a residential population of 254,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. The CRD says that the marginally-larger McLoughlin plant will be able to serve a residential population of 342,000 plus institutional, commercial and industrial users. Why is there such a dramatic difference in the per capita capacity provision for Victoria and North Vancouver? When McLoughlin’s treatment capacity is compared with Kelowna’s, there’s a similarly large per capita difference in the capacity being provided. Tellingly, Kelowna and Lions Gate have allowed for almost identical per capita capacity. Comparison of the physical sizes of the sites that will be used by Victoria, Kelowna and Lions Gate point to the cause. Kelowna’s plant is located on nine hectares, Lions Gate on three hectares. The McLoughlin Point site, which will serve the largest population of the three, is only 1.4 hectares in size. It’s that small size that limited the treatment capacity the CRD could build there. The risk to taxpayers in this situation is that the CRD’s shift from a four-plant configuration to putting all treatment at McLoughlin wasn’t based on a careful assessment of the regions’s predictable treatment needs or a value for money approach to the problem. The CRD has created a situation where construction of a second plant at substantial cost to taxpayers may be right around the corner—the very same result the CRD says would follow having to build a smaller plant at McLoughlin. Why did the CRD’s plan for four plants shift to just one large one? In June of 2010, CRD directors were told the consolidation to a central site was necessary to ensure federal funding. But the timing of this shift suggests local political considerations may have also played a part. The four-plant configuration was dumped soon after CRD staff experienced hostile encounters with residents of Saanich East-North Oak Bay in the spring of 2010 during public consultation on the CRD’s plan to locate a treatment plant in Haro Woods. At least one indignant Saanich resident told the CRD that, if it went ahead with its plan, he would sue them if he detected so much as a “whiff” of sewage. A CRD report on that consultation noted, “Throughout the public events, CRD staff witnessed a high degree of aggressiveness and distress amongst some participants. CRD staff will look to incorporate best practices in future public processes which discourage these types of behaviours. This [is] to ensure everyone has an equal opportunity to participate and share their own views in a neutral and safe environment.” In fact, the Haro Woods encounters were the last any member of the public saw of CRD staff before the sudden announcement that all treatment would take place in Esquimalt. No consultation took place with Esquimalt residents before that consolidation, even though the Environmental Management Act explicitly required the CRD to do so. Esquimalt has been fighting back ever since. Was a super-sized McLoughlin plant a quick fix for Saanich politicians fearful of blow-back from well-heeled constituents, rather than a reasoned approach to providing the most cost effective treatment solution over the long term? This was the moment when the CRD’s plan began its slow-motion derailment. That Esquimalt might rezone to suit its preferences ought to have occurred to CRD officers and directors back then, but if it did, they seemed to have misjudged the relief that might be provided by section 37. Desjardins captured this in her letter to Polak when she reminded the Minister that as recently as April 24 at a CRD board meeting, CRD CEO Robert Lapham stated the CRD “isn’t obligated to rezone the property.” Desjardins wrote, “[Lapham] asks Mr Hull—an engineer, not a lawyer—for the reference to the Act that states that. There is no Act that states that.” Desjardins letter provided the Minister with a full transcript of Lapham’s halting, apparently confused grasp of the CRD’s unsupportable position. Desjardins told Polak the “CRD’s attack on the Township Zoning Bylaw is incorrect in law, internally inconsistent, and hypocritical…The CRD’s assertions are more argument than they are settled law. If there is a proper legal argument to be made regarding municipal zoning, the CRD can and should make it in Court.” Pointing to a way out of the “impasse,” Desjardins told Polak, “CRD’s assessments of the appropriate models of sewage treatment and sites are dated and were made on cost assumptions that have proven to be incorrect. There is other evidence to suggest decentralized systems can be built for less cost.” Desjardins and her councillors have already moved to distance them from the CRD’s “dated” models. They’ve joined forces with Cascadia Green Building Council and have launched the “Esquimalt Village Living Community Design Competition.” This is intended to be an “international design competition” that “strives to craft a 21st Century sewage treatment solution for Esquimalt that can also be used as a model for the entire region,” according to a Cascadia press release. In the release, Cascadia’s Neville Grigg noted, “The design competition incorporates sewage treatment into the heart of the community as a source of water, heat and energy which will offer a sustainable, competitive advantage for Esquimalt.” I asked Desjardins if she would support a reworked regional treatment plan based on the CRD’s 2010 four-plant configuration, with either a much smaller plant at McLoughlin or one located in the Esquimalt Village centre. “The best value may not be McLoughlin at all,” she said, “because there’s nowhere at McLoughlin where resources can be utilized at their highest value.” Desjardins added, “That’s partly why Cascadia is looking at the opportunity in the Esquimalt Village project, because it will have new development very close which can hook in almost immediately. The use of the heat and energy coming out of the treatment centre for public buildings in the area is substantial.” Desjardins said Esquimalt would consider including Vic West and View Royal in the Village treatment plant. I asked Desjardins a second time if she could see supporting a smaller plant at McLoughlin as part of a regional system. “Here’s my real problem with McLoughlin,” she said. “Not only would it not be the best use but you haven’t taken into consideration the biggest concern: Why would we put that infrastructure right at the entrance to the harbour—and why would we put it in a tsunami zone? Can you fit the plant into the provincial guidelines that advise setbacks of 15 metres? Why would we put a plant in harm’s way? We know that climate change is causing rising sea level. During Hurricane Sandy, all of the big plants went down; none of the distributed systems went down. All those things are saying ‘Don’t do it.’” Esquimalt’s and Desjardins’ position are supported by a large number of regional citizens who the CRD has bluntly labelled “the opposition.” One such thorn in the CRD’s side is the Sewage Treatment Action Group (STAG). Over the past several months STAG has developed information about an alternative to the CRD’s one-plant configuration that would see construction of a number of distributed tertiary treatment plants. I reported here last month on STAG Director Richard Atwell’s research that showed the CRD has been cherry-picking costs from different studies, depending on which would make tertiary distributed look the most expensive and the one-plant configuration look the least costly. The CRD insists a study done for it in 2009 showed an 11-plant distributed model would cost “$2 billion.” (The study actually put the cost at $1.85 billion.) Atwell’s research also suggested that a distributed tertiary model based on the building concept and treatment technology used at Lighthouse Point Water Reclamation Facility in Blaine, Washington, if applied to Victoria, would cost far less than the CRD’s “$2 billion.” This doesn’t seem to be fully supported by the numbers. Blaine’s Public Works Director Ravyn Whitewolf told Focus the Lighthouse Point project cost $36 million, including engineering, construction and construction management costs. That figure didn’t include conveyancing to and from the plant, or an outfall.The facility uses membrane bioreactor technology like Dockside Green’s and produces water than can be reused for agriculture. The facility bears little resemblance to the industrial-looking buildings most of us associate with public works projects. Whitewolf, a professional engineer, said the plant was designed for a maximum Average Dry Weather Flow (ADWF) of 3.4 million litres per day. BC’s municipal sewage regulations require treatment plants to be capable of treating twice the measured ADWF to secondary standards. The McLoughlin plant, for example, was designed for an ADWF of 108 million litres per day, but would have been capable of secondary treatment of 216 million litres per day. To treat that amount of sewage would require 63 Blaine-size plants. At $36 million a pop, 63 plants would cost $2.3 billion. This is, of course, just an arithmetical exercise. When the CRD’s consultants designed the aforementioned four-plant configuration, the plant to be located in Haro Woods was designated for tertiary treatment and the design capacity for that plant was set at 1.75 times ADWF. If that reduction in treatment capacity was permitted by the Province across the system, only 56 Blaine-size plants would be needed. At $36 million a pop, 56 plants would cost $2.0 billion. If that last calculation is done for the current ADWF rather than for the capacity of the proposed McLoughlin Point system, 43 Blaine-size plants and $1.5 billion would be required. With this scenario, there would be no cost for unused capacity. More capacity could be added as required. All of the above assumes Blaine-sized plants. There would doubtless be savings by doubling or tripling the size of plants. But one of the attractions of the Blaine model is that its human-scale architecture would allow it to be located just about anywhere. To obtain economy of scale the physical size of the plants would need to increase. Whether that enlargement would start to erode the very attributes that would make such small plants easy to integrate into the city’s neighbourhoods is an open question. But that scaling up could make it politically difficult—if not impossible—to locate so many facilities that resemble, say, firehalls, into the community. Again, this is just an arithmetical exercise, and additional subtractions, multiplications and consideration of technical nuances are necessary for a clearer understanding of the real potential for alternative models so they can be properly compared with the CRD’s plan. In an election year, CRD politicians might want to consider doing that instead of twisting Minister Polak’s arm. In the article that follows this, Katherine Palmer Gordon relates what two scientists have to offer on this issue. One of them, Dr Chris Garrett, tells Palmer Gordon: “I’m not necessarily anti-sewage treatment, I’m pro-arithmetic.” Precisely. UPDATE On May 27, 2014, BC Environment Minister Mary Polak announced that she would not override Esquimalt's zoning. The Minister's announcement is here, the CRD's subsequent announcement here, and the Township of Esquimalt's response is here. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

May 2014 The risk of cost overruns on the new bridge was hidden. Is the same thing happening with sewage treatment plans? APRIL WAS A DANGEROUS MONTH for two local megaprojects and their political backers. City of Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin’s claim of a “fixed price” contract with the builder of the new Johnson Street Bridge turned out to be little more than a mayoral misunderstanding. That project’s acknowledged price is now almost certain to top $100 million and construction will likely run well into 2016. In the same week, CRD politicians’ attempt to ram a regional sewage treatment plant down the throat of the smallest municipality involved in the scheme proved to be an expensive political miscalculation. Esquimalt Council voted unanimously to push the project out of the municipality, and provincial Environment Minister Mary Polak made it clear she wouldn’t interfere on behalf of the CRD. Both projects claimed to address problems for which there was little or no evidence of immediate danger to the public. Instead, the compulsion to get shovels in the ground in both cases came from claims—never verified—that supportive funding from upper levels of government could disappear. In that atmosphere of a looming deadline, proper planning and thorough consideration of alternative solutions were abandoned and financial risks hidden. The fear most Victorians have now is that the projects have dubious merits yet will add dearly to their annual household costs. Let’s start with the bridge and examine closely the source of the mayor’s confusion. There is a cautionary tale therein, one that backers of the centralized sewage treatment project might want to digest slowly before attempting to restart their unpopular program in the middle of an election year. This image of work on the new JSB bridge was taken in China in March 2014. It suggests that, at the time the photo was taken, this critical aspect of the project was about 10 months behind schedule. TO UNDERSTAND THE ORIGINS of Mayor Fortin’s misunderstanding about the nature of the contract he signed with the bridge’s builder, I’ll replay a series of critical events that took place in 2012. Our understanding of what happened behind closed doors at City Hall as these events unfolded is made possible by the excellent hindsight provided by provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. You might recall that councillors had first approved replacing the current bridge in April 2009 when the price of a new “signature” bridge—complete with on-street bicycle lanes, three lanes for vehicular traffic, a railway track and separate pedestrian/cycling amenities—was estimated at $40 million. This price rose within days to $63 million; the company that did the estimate left out a lane-width of bridge. A year later—in a “Class C” cost estimate—a bridge without rail on it was pegged at $77 million. In March 2012, however, City staff announced the price to build a new bridge had risen to $92.8 million. This last jump in the estimate was accompanied by a major reconceptualization of the one-of-a-kind bridge’s physical configuration. If you’ve been following the sewage treatment project’s twisted history, this reconceptualization of the new bridge was the equivalent of going from a three-plant distributed system to a single centralized plant at McLoughlin Point—it was a fundamental change that should have triggered alarm bells in the minds of Victoria councillors. Alarm bells didn’t sound because neither City staff nor the City’s project manager MMM Group told councillors that the project had undergone a fundamental rethink. Councillors weren’t told that engineering challenges had been encountered with the unique design, or that only partly-worked-out conceptual solutions to those problems had been found. Instead, a March 2012 staff report urged councillors to commit to a form of procurement (“Design-Assist”) that would quickly secure a contractor to build the bridge. The report stated, “This [course of action] secures the contractor as soon as possible and allows the contractor to plan and execute the installation of coffer dams prior to the close of the next fisheries work window on February 15, 2013. This is required to accommodate the in-water construction of bridge foundations in order to maintain project schedule.” Councillors had long been warned by City staff that if project schedule wasn’t maintained, federal funding would be jeopardized. To ensure construction began as soon as the winter fisheries window opened, staff were saying, in effect, a bridge builder needed to be ready to go by December of that year. The need for committing to immediate action and making irrevocable decisions was tied to preserving federal funding. So without realizing that the bridge design was still at a conceptual level, and accepting City’s staff’s admonition that they had to move quickly, councillors agreed to enter into a procurement process. By May 2012 three construction firms (PCL Constructors Westcoast, Kiewit Infrastructure, Walsh Construction) had been short-listed to submit bid proposals. The City’s RFP stipulated that proposals must include “a fixed price for the complete performance of all of the Contractor’s obligations under the Contract.” The RFP also stipulated that proponents would provide an “Indicative Price” based on MMM’s design, which it now claimed was at “60 percent” completion even though it was simply a concept. The first indication to City staff that the project was in trouble—aside from the aforementioned doubling of the cost estimate over a two-year period—was when all three proponents said they couldn’t build MMM’s design for the City’s $66 million budget for construction. (Other costs, including MMM’s project management fee, brought the total estimate to $92.8 million.) Undaunted, City staff proceeded to the next phase of the procurement process: “collaborative” meetings with the proponents. Senior City staff records of those meetings, obtained by FOI, show that all three companies expressed strong reservations about MMM’s conceptual design; all three proposed “optimizations” that would change every aspect of MMM’s design; only the basic shape of the bridge originally proposed by Wilkinson Eyre architect Sebastien Ricard was left more or less intact. The need to extensively reconsider MMM’s design delayed the RFP process and the closing date for final bids was extended by two and a half months. The previously pressing need to have a contract signed by the end of November so as to “maintain project schedule” vanished. On November 1, 2012 the City received three bids, the details of which were shared with only four or five of City Hall’s most senior managers. Each of the bids produced significantly different proposals on how to create a bridge that looked like the one in MMM’s design. Two bids were much higher, price-wise, than the City’s “affordability ceiling,” and all three bids completely reconfigured the mechanical scheme for making the bridge lift. Kiewit Infrastructure’s engineers said, “unknowns and/or unexpected costs” of MMM’s “unconventional design” would “conflict with the City’s mandate to remain near or below the indicated Affordability Ceiling.” Kiewit added that MMM’s design “may represent a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.” They advised the City to abandon MMM’s “rolling wheel” concept in favour of a bridge that rotated on bearings fixed at the centre of the big wheels. They might as well have said, “Why reinvent the wheel?” In their critical review PCL noted that MMM’s design “was heavily imbalanced” in the open position and that “the level of imbalance…is greater than was used for the design of the span drive machinery.” PCL also noted: “The support machinery… was considered to present a significant unknown in terms of the performance of the bridge when deformations were taken into account. The tolerances specified…are impossibly tight, and were viewed to be impossible to maintain after erection of the bascule span.” Overall, very little of MMM’s design was left unchanged. Ironically, two of the bids included construction schemes that would eliminate the need for the coffer dam that had been used months earlier to rush councillors into the procurement phase. In PCL’s bid proposal every single element of the bridge had changed in shape, the material it would be made from, or both of those. Although PCL’s bid was within the City’s affordability ceiling, the risk to City taxpayers was high. PCL’s bid might have been low-balled to ensure it became the preferred proponent. Once it was in that position, PCL could then negotiate a contract with City officials in which a higher cost could be hidden, possibly by mutual agreement, in the details of the contract. That this was a real risk was underlined by the fact that the other two bids proposed radically different mechanical concepts and put the cost of building the bridge much higher than PCL’s suspiciously low bid. Only a small circle of senior City managers were aware of the details of the bids. This was the most critical moment in the project’s 4-year life. City staff and the project’s political backers no doubt would have preferred all of these concerns to remain hidden; for the project to fail at that moment would have hurt political careers—particularly the mayor’s—and marred the professional reputations of these highly-paid, ambitious bureaucrats. Should they go public with details of the bids? Or should they keep it all hidden and try to negotiate a contract with PCL? When I wrote about this in Focus’ March edition I wasn’t able to say whether City councillors had been warned by City staff about this risky situation. Had the warnings of PCL, Kiewit and Walsh been communicated to councillors? After all, the City was going to pay $75,000 to each unsuccessful proponent participating in the bid process, mainly for providing a critical review of MMM’s design and suggesting ways to improve it. Given the drastic nature of the changes all three companies were proposing—and the fact that two of the bids were far above what the City said it could afford—wasn’t the costly and independent advice of the engineering teams exactly the kind of information City staff should have shared with councillors? Did they? Hold that question in your mind a minute as we consider something else that happened before City staff told councillors about the bids: Six days after receiving the three bid proposals and their stinging critiques of MMM’s flawed design, Mayor Fortin signed MMM to a new $9.1-million contract to project manage and redesign the bridge. That’s right. Almost as soon as City engineers learned how badly they had been served by MMM’s project management and engineering services, they signed MMM up for more of the same. So did City engineers inform councillors of what was in the engineering reviews of MMM’s design? They did not. The staff report delivered to councillors at a November 16, 2012 in camera meeting, and the minutes of that meeting, including the questions asked by councillors and the answers provided by engineering staff, were recently obtained from the City’s FOI office. That staff report shows that none of the warnings from PCL, Kiewit or Walsh, nor the actual bid amounts from Kiewit or Walsh, were provided to councillors. The minutes also show that none of the councillors asked about any aspect of the Kiewit or Walsh bids. (Download the staff report and minutes as well as the individual proposals from the menu at the end of the article) The staff report shows that City staff told councillors PCL’s bid was $63.4 million and “The other two proposals also offered optimizations, but their prices were above the City Affordability Ceiling, and therefore include significant risk that it would not be possible to reach an acceptable agreement with these other proponents.” Yet City staff mentioned none of the numerous risks pointed out by PCL, Kiewit and Walsh. The City had said going into the RFP that their $66 million affordability ceiling included a “ten percent” contingency. PCL’s proposal left only a four percent contingency. When asked about this at the meeting, the minutes note that councillors were told: “Arriving at a design built with a five percent contingency is normal...This is a unique project, [so] that is why the contingency is different.” Even though City staff knew the design level was, at that point, less than 60 percent because of all the proposed changes in the bridge’s design, they led councillors to believe a “five percent” contingency was normal, and at the same time it was “different” because of the one-of-a-kind design. Shouldn’t it have been higher? American bridge engineer Ed Wortman recently told Focus, “The $2.8 million contingency allowance seems too low for the design at the 60 percent level. This amount would be reasonable for 100 percent final design but not for an incomplete design.” Especially noteworthy is that the staff report told councillors: “It was also important to note that the proposal from PCL had no proposed amendments to the draft construction contract.” This appears to be a significant misrepresentation. PCL’s proposal actually stated, “In keeping with the collaborative intent of the RFP, PCL is proposing a modified contract.” After outlining its understanding of the design and price negotiations that the draft contract would set up, PCL’s bid proposal then stated, “PCL is proposing a subtle deviation to this process where...” which is followed by a big blank space in the copy of the proposal provided to Focus. The modification to the contract PCL proposed was redacted by the City on the basis that disclosure would be harmful to PCL’s business interests. On the recommendation of senior City staff who signed the report, all but one councillor (Ben Isitt) voted to proceed with negotiations with PCL. Forty-five days later, the City had signed a contract with PCL to build a bridge for a “fixed price” even though the design was little more than conceptual. The contract Mayor Fortin signed, and that all councillors—except Ben Isitt and Lisa Helps—approved on December 31, 2012, has a provision in it that allows PCL to submit a “Claim for Change.” On March 17 of this year PCL submitted a claim for $7.9 million based on, according to the City’s Director of Engineering Dwayne Kalynchuk, “design delay” and “scope growth.” Given that the design of the bridge—a structure that various engineers have described as very complex—had been knocked back to a conceptual level during the RFP process, the mayor ought not be surprised that “design delay” has occurred. Perhaps he isn’t. As for “scope growth,” one example of a significant material change in the bridge that took place since the contract was signed has been documented by Focus over the last several months. In its proposal, PCL envisioned a simple interface between the 1700-tonne bascule leaf and the rollers that support that weight. But the interface that was eventually chosen is vastly more complex and expensive than PCL envisioned, and now includes the use of 4000 gallons of epoxy grout. Such a design change would have been executed by the engineering company designing the bascule leaf (Hardesty & Hanover), but, under the terms of PCL’s contract, the change had to first be approved by MMM Group, who have overall responsibility for design. The City has stated that MMM will provide “advice on the merits of PCL’s request,” but one thing is already clear: fabrication of the critical bascule leaf in China only got started in March 2014, approximately 10 months behind the schedule outlined by the City and MMM in March 2013. A local expert on contracts and procurement—who requested anonymity because of dealings with the City and/or engineering companies involved in the project—said an overrun of $7.9 million so early in the construction schedule was the mark of a project that is “financially doomed.” The expert said that a fixed price contract shouldn’t have been entertained by the City until the design was at “85 percent.” The contract expert called Mayor Fortin’s claim that the City has a fixed price contract and doesn’t expect to pay the $7.9 million “disingenuous,” and said, “A ‘fixed price’ contract is not a ‘fixed price’ anymore if the project scope or schedule materially changes.” Should the mayor expect MMM to reject PCL’s claim? The expert told Focus, “It’s the fox in the henhouse with MMM reviewing the claim—especially when they could be potentially at fault.” The $7.9 million additional cost will push the project’s publicly-acknowledged price to $100.1 million. Mayor Fortin and his engineering department staff appear to have taken the advice of former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Interviewed about a $300 million cost overrun on a train terminal being built in San Francisco, Brown famously said, “We always knew the initial estimate was way under the real cost. If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever get approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.” ACROSS CENTENNIAL SQUARE from Victoria City Hall, the CRD has been busily digging such a hole for over a year: In March 2013 the CRD secretly purchased a site on Viewfield Road for $17 million on the chance it could be used as the site for an anaerobic digester as part of its purported “$782.7 million” secondary sewage treatment program. In May 2013 the commission appointed to oversee implementation of the program issued an RFP to design and build a plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt, and by June had short-listed three teams of engineering and construction firms. The successful bid was expected to be announced “in the spring of 2014.” The commission then hired Albert Sweetnam as program director at a salary of $290,000 a year, including a $290,000 bonus if Sweetnam completes his five-year contract. In September, construction began on the first component of the program—the $11.5 million Craigflower Pump Station. In November a contract was awarded to design another component, the estimated $9.5 million Arbutus Road Attenuation Tank. In March of this year Acumen Communications Group were awarded a $1.5 million contract to supply communications services and Millennia Research signed a $600,000 deal to provide assistance in case human remains are uncovered during excavation work. Stantec, the engineering consultants, have an existing contract that will see them paid close to $40 million for “program consultant services” to 2018. By the end of 2013 the CRD had spent $65.4 million developing the program. That’s a big hole. All these expenditures were approved by a majority of CRD directors even though a final agreement to rezone McLoughlin Point was not in place. On April 7 Esquimalt Council voted unanimously to reject the CRD’s rezoning application. Whoops. Esquimalt Council votes unanimously to reject a rezoning application that would have permitted a sewage treatment plant at McLouglin Point Asked if she would intervene, provincial Environment Minister Mary Polak told CBC Radio, “I am not inclined to intervene in a matter that is ultimately, and should ultimately be a local decision… No provincial government should take lightly the idea of interfering when it comes to something that is legitimately within the bounds of a local government… I certainly will review whatever request is made of us and I will look forward to seeing what the CRD presents.” On April 10, CRD Chair Alastair Bryson wrote to Polak and outlined what the CRD saw as its only options: It could “proceed in defiance of the bylaw,” abandon sewage treatment altogether (which, Bryson said, would place CRD “directors, officers and employees…in personal jeopardy of prosecution”), or find a replacement for the McLoughlin Point site, which “would necessitate re-negotiation of the funding agreements with senior governments. With a multi-year delay and significant uncertainty about when such a process would conclude, critical dates in the agreements could not be met.” Bryson asked Polak to initiate “a Cabinet Order to suspend the operation of those provisions of the existing Zoning Bylaw…to allow this important project to proceed to construction.” At the time Focus went to press, there had been no public response to the CRD from Polak. Will the Minister take the CRD’s list of its options seriously? Attempting to build a sewage treatment plant without a building permit would set an interesting precedent; who else might follow the CRD’s example? Costco? Bryson’s worrying out loud about being prosecuted is dramatic, but federal regulations won’t come into effect locally until 2020. Bryson and his fellow directors don’t know for certain they’ll still be directors following this November’s civic elections, let alone in 2020. The CRD’s real play in its letter to Polak is the threat of losing contributory funding from the provincial and federal governments, an argument aimed not so much at Polak as it is at other civic politicians thinking of standing up in support of Esquimalt’s position. As we saw earlier in this story, this is the same argument as used by City of Victoria staff to press their political enablers forward to a premature contract to build the Johnson Street Bridge. In his letter to Polak, Bryson left out a fourth option available to the CRD, the one Esquimalt’s Mayor Barb Desjardins supports, which she has called “a better plan.” If Polak doesn’t intervene in favour of the CRD’s McLoughlin Point plan, the CRD will be forced to consider a different plan. Since the CRD has said itself that no other viable site for a central plant exists in the CRD, the only option would appear to be to distribute treatment amongst participating municipalities. Colwood has already chosen this option. The CRD’s argument against distributed treatment is that it already considered that option and determined that it would cost “$2 billion.” On the other hand, the CRD are still saying that a $783 million estimate for the plan with a treatment plant at McLoughlin Point is still valid, even though it was done in 2010. Richard Atwell, a member of Sewage Treatment Action Group (STAG) and one of the developers of the “RITE Plan,” has found what appears to be a serious flaw in the CRD’s estimates: They’ve been cherry-picking cost estimates from two different studies. A 2007 study by Associated Engineering, CH2MHill and Kerr Wood Leidal determined that a 110-million-litres-per-day central plant at Macaulay Point would cost $572 million. A 2009 study by the same companies estimated that a 10-plant distributed system would cost $1.85 billion. In 2009 a third study for the CRD by Stantec and Brown & Caldwell put the cost of a 108-million-litres-per-day plant at McLoughlin Point at $210 million, far less than the 2007 study. The centralized plants in both studies had virtually the same capacity. Atwell points out that when the CRD uses “$783 million,” that estimate depends on the $210 million estimate for the centralized plant. On the other hand, as Atwell notes, the CRD’s estimate of “$2 billion” for the distributed system comes from the Associated Engineering study. If the CRD is going to uses Associated Engineering's “$2 billion” for a distributed system, why don’t they use Associated Engineering's $572 million for the centralized plant? Moreover, Atwell has determined that the 2009 Associated Engineering study put the cost of individual small plants in a distributed system at about 2.3 times the cost of a similar-sized (8 million litres per day) tertiary treatment plant in Blaine, Washington, completed in 2010. Atwell also argues the CRD’s claims about the amount of land distributed plants would require is similarly flawed. In its 2009 study, the footprint such a plant would require was estimated by Associated Engineering to be 1.5 acres. Atwell says that’s three times the area the plant in Blaine uses. The plant in Blaine, which has the physical resemblance of a marina-restaurant-retail-shopping complex, was designed by Brown & Caldwell. That’s the same Brown & Caldwell who participated in the 2009 Stantec study on a centralized system. Atwell questions why the CRD didn’t ask Brown & Caldwell to provide estimates for a distributed tertiary system. Atwell says “the CRD’s figures are totally unreliable for estimating the cost of a decentralized sewage treatment system.” He has created a video presentation of this information: www.sewagefacts.ca. If the CRD’s estimate for a decentralized system seems fishy, is its 2010 estimate for a centralized system reliable? The estimate was performed by Stantec at the same time that company did a peer review of the $77 million cost estimate for a new Johnson Street Bridge. Stantec judged the bridge estimate to be “reasonable” even though it didn’t include, for example, anything for “approvals and permits.” At the time Stantec did that peer review “approvals and permits” had already cost the project $320,000. That sum had been paid to…Stantec. At the very least, Stantec’s 2010 centralized system estimate ought to be adjusted for inflation and for the $38 million the CRD has said would likely be needed for a biosolids incinerator. With those adjustments, the estimate becomes $885.5 million. The lesson from the bridge project is that nobody’s figures can be relied upon and that financial risks to taxpayers will be hidden. Early on in that issue, Victoria City Councillor Geoff Young tried to get fellow councillors to seriously consider repairing the existing bridge; that would have required doing a cost estimate based on practical considerations about how to get the most life out of what the City already owned. His fellow councillors refused to follow Young’s practical suggestion and instead insisted on a cost estimate that would justify a decision they had already made. Mayor Desjardins, Richard Atwell, STAG and many others are now asking Young to support doing an updated cost estimate for a distributed tertiary treatment system in which the burden of hosting treatment is both physically and politically shared. Given the way the bridge project has unfolded, you would think that Young, the chair of the CRD’s sewage committee, would want to support that. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

April 2014 Awarding of a CRD sewage treatment project contract to Stantec that turned out to be worth $43 million was overseen by two former Stantec employees. LET'S PARSE STANTEC'S expected $43 million share of the $783 million CRD sewage treatment program, one meeting at a time, and figure out how that happened. To start, we need to crank our minds back—way, way back—to 2006. That’s when it all began. Just three working days after Environment Minister Barry Penner wrote the Capital Regional District and ordered it to develop a plan for sewage treatment, Dwayne Kalynchuk was promoting his former employer— Stantec—as the go-to company to meet the Minister’s challenge. Kalynchuk was then General Manager of the CRD’s Environmental Services Department. In a July 26, 2006 report to the Core Area Liquid Waste Management Committee (the sewage committee), Kalynchuk wrote, “t is recommended that a comprehensive report on treatment options, procurement strategies and update costing be prepared.” Kalynchuk argued that his former employer ought to be given the job because “Stantec has already provided estimates in the past for treatment at Clover and Macaulay, so any proposed changes at these locations should be consistent with work already done.” Stantec’s previous experience with the CRD, Kalynchuk asserted, “will facilitate a review in both a timely and cost-effective fashion.” A schedule included with the report showed the study could be completed in three months. Kalynchuk’s report put the “expected” cost at $125,000 and recommended Stantec be awarded a contract without calling for competitive bids. The CRD’s minutes for that meeting stated, “Mr. Kalynchuk pointed out that the staff report had been written prior to the receipt of Minister Penner’s letter. However, staff felt the proposed action to prepare a comprehensive treatment options and strategy report was in line with the Minister’s direction.” The minutes then recorded that “Considerable discussion ensued. General concern was expressed regarding sole sourcing the work.” The upshot? CRD directors didn’t bite on Kalynchuk’s recommendation to hire Stantec. Kalynchuk had started working for the CRD just 10 months earlier. His past employment included a stint with Stantec in their Edmonton headquarters. A news story from the October 2003 edition of Peg, the official publication of Alberta’s professional engineers, noted his recent appointment at Stantec and stated, “Mr. Kalynchuk will assist in the areas of infrastructure management and pavement engineering, as well as transportation and environmental infrastructure practice, primarily in their marketing efforts.” In the parlance of the engineering community, “environmental infrastructure practice” means sewage treatment facilities. It’s not unreasonable to ask: Was Kalynchuk still “marketing” for Stantec at that July 26, 2006 meeting when he proposed by-passing a competitive bid process? (Kalynchuk declined to comment for this article.) Over the next three years the CRD gathered information needed to develop the plan Penner had ordered. A team of private consulting firms—which didn’t include Stantec—inched the CRD forward. In July 2008, Tony Brcic was hired as the treatment program’s project manager. Brcic, too, had worked at Stantec—for 18 years before leaving in 2005. In March 2009 Kalynchuk and Brcic made a pitch to the sewage committee in which they argued for contracting with a firm that would serve as the “program management consultant.” Their report described the work that firm would do, including “finalizing site selection, preparing a Class C estimate for the project to satisfy the requirements of the business case and providing services to enable the CRD to submit the Liquid Waste Management Plan amendment by the end of 2009...” Kalynchuk and Brcic argued for a “quality based selection process” rather than a competitive process. Their report stated, “The system configuration and method of procurement for the [Core Area Waste Treatment Plan] will not be know until approved by the minister of environment in early 2010. Therefore, it is difficult at this stage to establish a defined scope of work for consulting firms to price. It is on this basis that CRD staff recommends using the [quality based assessment] process to hire the program management consultant.” Even though Kalynchuk and Brcic pointed out that “the provincial and federal governments require a transparent and competitive process and may not find [quality based assessment] acceptable,” their report recommended it anyway. The minutes of the meeting at which that report was delivered make it clear that Kalynchuk “provided…the estimated cost of a [program management consultant] over the entire project, and the comparison of hourly rates with industry standards.” The minutes did not record what either of those were, but as we will see later on, the recipient of a great deal of tax money was about to be decided. Using a quality based assessment process would allow Kalynchuk and Brcic to define the parameters by which they could narrow the field of interested engineering companies down to a recommendation. It was a less-than-transparent, subjective process that could—if someone wanted to—be shaped to produce a desired outcome. On June 10, 2009, Kalynchuk and Brcic brought their recommendation for the program management consultant to an in camera meeting of the sewage committee. Three justifications were given for closing the meeting. The first was that holding the meeting in public might harm the business interests of a third party. The second reason given was Section 90(1) (e) of the BC Community Charter, which gives directors the choice of going in camera if they’re going to discuss acquisition, disposition or expropriation of land or improvements and they decide that disclosure could reasonably be expected to harm the interests of the regional district. The third reason, also from the Community Charter, was that Kalynchuk’s and Brcic’s recommendation could somehow be construed as “negotiations and related discussions respecting the proposed provision of a municipal service that are at their preliminary stages and that, in the view of the directors, could reasonably be expected to harm the interests of the regional district if they were held in public.” Was the CRD justified in closing the meeting? The recommendation of a management consultant doesn’t appear to have anything to do with “acquisition, disposition or expropriation of land or improvements.” Moreover, how could open discussion of Kalynchuk’s and Brcic’s recommendation of a program management consultant—and how they arrived at that recommendation—be harmful to the interests of the CRD? Only three months beforehand Kalynchuk and Brcic had reported that “the provincial and federal governments require a transparent and competitive process…” Of the three reasons the CRD gave for closing the meeting, only the “harm to the business interests of a third party” seems to be in play. The minutes of the closed June 10 meeting only show that directors voted to “rise and report,” which means they decided to record, in the briefest terms possible, the outcome of the closed meeting. Their report noted that Stantec had been “approved as the program management firm” and that CRD staff had been “authorized to enter into negotiations with Stantec to develop a consulting service agreement…” It’s not a big leap to assume these were the recommendations of Brcic and Kalynchuk, both former Stantec employees. On July 22, 2009, having negotiated with Stantec, Kalynchuk and Brcic came back to the sewage committee directors with a list of initial tasks that Stantec would undertake for the sum of $3,565,220. Looking through that list, it’s hard to say why it couldn’t have been used to define the scope of work in the first of a series of competitive bids. The minutes for this meeting show no indication anybody made this objection. In fact the minutes record little more than that “Staff noted the hourly rates of the selected firm were competitive with the others, and the costs fit in with the planning budget and work plan.” Sewage committee directors approved Stantec’s contract with only Directors Derman, Gaul and Saunders opposed. Thus Kalynchuk’s and Brcic’s quality based assessment process set up a routine where, periodically, Stantec would estimate the cost of completing or advancing progress on a list of tasks; CRD staff would note that Stantec’s hourly rates “were competitive;” and sewage committee directors would vote to approve a renewed contract with Stantec. But in this routine there was never any way of telling whether the number of hours Stantec was estimating a task would require was “competitive” or outrageous. Press reports of that meeting show that Kalynchuk had told sewage committee directors the Stantec contract would “likely be around one percent of the project’s total cost.” At that time, the CRD were saying the project would cost $1.1 billion. At one percent, Stantec’s expected haul over the life of the project would have been $11 million. Instead, by mid-November 2013 Stantec had already billed the CRD for $11.3 million and the estimated cost for their services over the life of the project had grown to over $43 million. CRD Director Vic Derman, who has been on the sewage committee since its inception, told journalist Rob Shaw at the time, “Maybe I missed something, but I didn’t think it would be that high.” Shaw also reported that the sewage treatment program’s Project Director Albert Sweetnam told him, “Stantec is not being overpaid. I’ve looked at the rates. The rates are reasonable.” Shaw, who reported extensively on the sewage treatment issue for years before leaving for the Vancouver Sun, speculated on one possible source of the increase in what Stantec will be paid: “Some of the Stantec advice has led to key decisions on the project’s size and scope. Other advice, such as a report used to recommend the application of sewage sludge to land, has been shot down by local politicians.” In other words, some of Stantec’s work had been wasted. But an examination of Stantec’s billing of the CRD since 2009, obtained by FOI, shows that the vast majority of the $30 million difference between Kalynchuk’s “one percent” and the current estimate has nothing to do with work that has already been done. The $30 million will be paid for work Stantec has yet to do. It seems possible that Kalynchuk low-balled the cost of a program management consultant in 2009 to help convince sewage committee directors to avoid an open and competitive bid process. A competitive process would have been more transparent and could have eliminated the uncertainty over whether the number of hours a consultant estimated for future work was reasonable or outrageous. This likely would have saved taxpayers millions of dollars. Of course, this project has just begun. If Stantec’s “Class C” estimate of costs turns out to be as inaccurate as Kalynchuk’s estimate of how much Stantec would cost taxpayers, the project cost could rise to $3 billion. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

March 2014 Documents recently obtained by FOI show the City of Victoria was warned by engineers of two of the three companies bidding on the Johnson Street Bridge project that the floating-ring design was too risky to build. The City went ahead anyway. THE GOOD NEWS IS that the City of Victoria finally released the three November 2012 bid proposals for the new bridge contract. Those proposals were the only chance for City councillors and interested citizens to hear what experienced bridge engineers thought about the design Wilkinson Eyre and MMM Group dreamed up in a hurry back in 2009. The bad news is that whatever the engineers said probably wasn’t heard by City councillors and is now irrelevant. There’s no going back—the bridge is being fabricated in China and steel support pilings drilled into the harbour as you read this. Focus requested these documents in November 2012. They were released to us by the City last month. The ugly news is what the engineers said. The three companies chosen to submit bids—PCL Constructors Westcoast, Kiewit Infrastructure, and Walsh Construction—were required to provide an “Indicative Design Review” as part of their bids. Each of the companies was paid $50,000 for their participation. The “Indicative Design” was the final version of the design the City contracted MMM Group to develop with Wilkinson Eyre. Below is a drawing of the most contentious element of that design—the lifting mechanism. MMM Group's "Indicative Design" Providing proof that nice guys finish first, PCL didn’t have much criticism to dish out. Instead, they offered up a reworked MMM design that Victoria is likely going to regret in 30 or so years. Why? Because that’s the design life for critical “subject to wear” parts of the lifting mechanism that PCL had to incorporate in order to meet the City’s “affordability ceiling.” And for reasons that I’ll tell you about towards the end of this story, replacing those critical parts may be impossible short of taking a cutting torch and a wrecking ball to the bridge. The big story here is that Kiewit and Walsh both ditched the Indicative Design’s fundamental mechanical concept: the two big rings floating freely on supporting rollers. This was the first time engineers had been able to publicly voice their professional opinion about the design (engineers are constrained by their Code of Ethics from publicly commenting on the work of other engineers) and a rare opportunity for the public and their elected representatives to get independent reviews of MMM’s claim that it would be reliable and durable. Kiewit’s and Walsh’s critiques of MMM’s design contained several concerns that were addressed in PCL’s proposal, so in the summary below I am including only criticisms that PCL’s final design did not address. As mentioned, the Kiewit and Walsh proposals both broadly rejected the heart of MMM’s Indicative Design, the mechanism used to raise and lower the movable section of the bridge. MMM’s design called for the lifting part of the bridge to be attached to two 50-foot-diameter rings, each of those supported by four large rollers. By rotating the 50-foot rings, the bridge could be raised or lowered. Since 2009 the mechanical concept has gone through several iterations, indicating uncertainty. Project watchdog Ross Crockford, a director of johnsonstreetbridge.org, called the design “experimental,” in 2010, which brought this response from MMM’s Joost Meyboom: “...elements of the proposed mechanical system have been developed to be simple and robust. They are based on applications from heavy industry such as foundries where similar mechanical arrangements have been used for decades under conditions that are considerably more aggressive and demanding than anticipated at the Johnson Street Bridge.” But in their bid proposal to the City Walsh’s engineers noted, “To the best of our knowledge, the only other application of this bridge type, also designed by Wilkinson Eyre, was built for the City of London’s Canary Wharf development. That bridge is significantly smaller than the proposed Johnson Street Bridge. Maintenance of the support rollers might be very difficult since the entire weight of the bridge rests on these supports. Should repair or replacement [of the rollers or their bearings] be necessary, jacking of the entire truss will be required to remove the load from these supports. The depth of the bridge pit will make shoring of the truss difficult and expensive and increase maintenance cost for this critical item.” Kiewit said it had consulted with “a number of steel and machinery fabricators, who are experienced in movable bridge design and/or construction. All expressed the opinion that there were likely more cost effective mechanical concepts for a bascule bridge than the one used as the basis for the Indicative Design.” Kiewit said “unknowns and/or unexpected costs” of MMM’s “unconventional design” would “conflict with the City’s mandate to remain near or below the indicated Affordability Ceiling. In summary, Kiewit is of the view that the Indicative Design may represent a fundamentally high risk and expensive design approach.” Kiewit’s engineers said their “comprehensive” review “resulted in the decision to propose a bascule concept based upon a more proven bridge type—the Strauss Bascule with under-deck counterweight. Joseph Strauss was a pioneer in bridge engineering who is best known as the Chief Engineer for design of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Strauss was also responsible for many innovative design patents and design of several movable bridges, including the existing Johnson Street Bridge.” Kiewit provided detailed drawings of the mechanism they were proposing. Kiewit's mechanical concept with span in open position Besides the Indicative Design’s unproven lifting mechanism, Kiewit noted that the counterweight in the Indicative Design was attached to the truss rings in a way that “would load the truss ring eccentrically, which could distort the ring—a highly undesirable condition.” The Strauss mechanism, they said, would provide a fixed axis on which the bridge could rotate, eliminating the complex arrangement of rollers beneath the rings. Kiewit noted their mechanism would reduce “seismic challenges” as well. Walsh, too, advised the City to use a mechanical design with proven reliability. They proposed to convert the design to a “rolling lift,” which, they said “continues to be used on numerous rolling lift bridges throughout the world.” Because “the drive system is a proven concept, it will meet the life expectancy requirements of the project and potentially lower overall maintenance costs over the life of the bridge.” Walsh did not include drawings of its proposed design. There were other aspects of MMM’s design criticized by the companies. Walsh provided the City with a sobering warning about the light-weight bridge deck specified for the bascule leaf: “The orthotropic deck will impose significant ongoing costs for maintenance of the roadway coating. It is expected that the deck will require recoating every five to ten years. In order to accomplish this, portions of the bridge will have to be closed, the deck sandblasted and new coating applied. We believe this will have significant long-term maintenance costs for the City.” Their solution? “An open grating deck with concrete-filled pathways for bicycles has a lower initial cost, easier erection, longer life...” Kiewit worried the difference in widths of the pedestrian walkway and the multi-modal pathway would “destabilize the balance of the bridge in both the static and dynamic conditions.” The “overhanging walkways” were “unnecessarily complicated,” and “introduce the possibility of harmonic oscillation that could be very uncomfortable for pedestrians.” This is the vibrational phenomenon that troubled the Millenium Bridge in London which, after being opened for just three days, closed for two years while modifications were made. Kiewit’s solution was to widen the south side pedestrian walkway to match the north side and place both walkways at the level of the road deck, as in the existing bridge. Walsh’s bid proposal totalled $91.6 million; PCL bid $63.4 million. Kiewit withheld its bid price from the record released to Focus. (UPDATE: The City of Victoria released Kiewit's bid amount in November 2014 in response to direction from OIPC following an FOI filed by Focus. Kiewit's bid proposal was $80.99 million.) After receiving and considering the bid proposals from PCL, Kiewit and Walsh, an evaluation committee of City engineers—Peter Sparanese, Dwayne Kalynchuk and Ken Jarvela—delivered a report and made recommendations to a closed meeting of City councillors in November 2012. Since the meeting was closed, there’s no way for the public to know if councillors were made aware of the Walsh and Kiewit engineers’ warnings and concerns, or whether they were told that PCL’s proposal included a 30-year design life for the many parts of the bridge’s mechanical system subject to wear. Councillor Lisa Helps told Focus that councillors had previously agreed to let City staff do the digging through the proposals; councillors were to confine themselves to voting on the evaluation committee’s recommendation. Did this hands-off approach serve the public interest? The substance of the Kiewit and Walsh proposals, along with the maintenance liabilities inherent in PCL’s adaptation of MMM design, suggest MMM had spent millions of taxpayer dollars developing a bad design. If councillors—who hold office to represent the public interest—weren’t told the truth about the problems, whose interests were being served? There were both private political and economic interests at stake that didn’t necessarily work well with the public interest. The mayor and councillors who supported the bridge project from its inception would have lost political face in a public humiliation of the project. But the bigger loser likely would have been MMM. Three days after the closed meeting at which City staff briefed councillors on the bid proposals, the City announced a new $9.1 million project management contract with MMM Group. That was on top of $2.1 million for project management and design services performed between 2009 and 2012. If City engineering staff had provided councillors with as full an account of what the bid proposals contained as you have just read, would councillors have agreed to renew MMM’s contract? Councillors could still vote to “rise and report” on what they were told at that meeting. In the meantime Focus has filed an FOI for the evaluation committee’s report and the minutes of that meeting. We will report on those when we get them. From other FOI requests filed in the last few months, more information about the design of the bridge has emerged. We have learned that no seismic assessment of the PCL design has been performed. Given the political promises to build a bridge able to withstand a magnitude 8.5 earthquake, the absence of even theoretical confirmation that the bascule leaf would indeed remain on its rollers in the so-called “Big One” is a surprising oversight. The ring truss isn’t physically attached to the substructure of the bridge in any way—it simply floats on the rollers—and the only thing keeping it from sliding off to one side or the other is a lip on the rollers about one inch high. Engineering drawings obtained recently have revealed certain features of the bridge that could make it “iconic” in a way not intended by the councillors who pushed for a signature bridge. The bridge could also become an international symbol of poor planning, a miniature Fukushima. This stems from the way in which the central design feature of MMM’s mechanical system—the rollers under the rings—have been reconfigured (again) by PCL’s engineering consultant Hardesty & Hanover. They initially proffered a support system that had 32 rollers under each ring instead of the four MMM envisioned. Now Hardesty & Hanover have changed their minds and believe 12 big support rollers for each ring is the magic combination. As you can see in the drawing below, to support all those big, heavy 42-inch-diameter rollers there is now a forest of machinery beneath the rings. This could be tough on future taxpayers: there appears to be no way of jacking the rings off the rollers to do necessary repairs like replacing the bearings; the space where jacks and shoring would go is filled with rollers and other unmovable machinery. The task that Walsh’s engineers warned would be “difficult and expensive” is now going to be even more difficult and more expensive. The wheels of progress grind on. Hardesty & Hanover mechanical system as per final construction drawing Another fundamental change Hardesty & Hanover made to MMM’s design was to change how the rollers contacted the rings. MMM’s design had the rings sitting directly on top of the rollers; they specified that a replaceable wear plate be attached to the rings. A simple, elegant idea. But MMM’s design required very precise—and expensive—fabrication tolerances for the rings. Hardesty & Hanover called them “impossibly tight...and impossible to maintain.” To get around that, and to stay within the City’s imposed affordability ceiling, Hardesty & Hanover came up with a truly bizarre cost-saving solution. Around the outside of each ring 11 U-shaped steel “support segments” will be attached. Each of these segments consist of about 85 separate pieces of steel that will be subject to rusting: lengths of crane rail, gear track, bolts, nuts and washers, flat metal plates, curved metal plates, etc, etc. Aesthetically, it will be messy. The segments will be arranged around one-half the outside circumference of the rings and—this is the truly strange why-is-this-happening-to-us? part—the strength to transfer the weight of the bridge to the rollers will be provided by epoxy grout pumped into the void between the segments and the rings. Not just a little epoxy grout, mind you, but iconic, mind-blowing amounts. Each ring will be swaddled in a semi-circular slab of epoxy grout that, if laid out flat on the ground, would be 12 inches deep, 55 inches wide (at its widest) and 80 feet long. The critical elements that connect the rings to the support segments will be forever encased in that epoxy grout, un-inspectable and inaccessible for the life of the bridge. And, because epoxy grout and steel have different thermal qualities, the grout will become fractured and separate from the steel. Water will get between the grout and the metal parts and corrosion will occur. How much corrosion? Since the parts will be inaccessible, no one will ever know. Has this technique ever been used on a bridge before? I posed that question to the professional engineer whose stamp appears on the construction drawings. He’s Sean Bluni, CEO of Hardesty & Hanover, working out of their New York City headquarters. I also asked Bluni how the bridge could be jacked to repair or replace subject-to-wear parts. Bluni said, “As we are contractually required to do, we will discuss your questions with the parties to whom we are providing service on this project.” Most likely, this will require a closed council meeting. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

March 2014 Emails between top-level BC civil servants show Premier Clark’s 100,000 LNG jobs were based on dubious assumptions thrown together at the last minute for her 2013 throne speech. Were those civil servants working for the public interest or Clark’s election campaign? THE BC PROSPERITY FUND got barely a mention in last month’s Speech from the Throne. But a year ago Premier Clark’s apparently far-sighted plan to develop a massive LNG industry that would create “100,000 jobs for BC families” and pump billions into Provincial coffers fuelled the launch of the Liberals’ election campaign. Their compelling clean-energy-and-jobs message brought them from 20 points behind to a surprising victory in last May’s election. Now, though, Clark’s government appears to be stepping back from all that. The legislation to introduce a new LNG-supportive tax regime has been postponed a second time, for no apparent reason. Although Finance Minister Mike de Jong outlined the tax regime in his February budget speech, his plan to introduce it is vague. Were the Prosperity Fund and the job claims part of an elaborate election ploy? It wouldn’t be the first time a government made an election promise it didn’t intend to keep. A more troubling possibility, though, is that Provincial public service employees and public funds were used to create that election ploy, contrary to the BC Standards of Conduct that govern what civil servants can do while on the job. Documents recently obtained by Focus through an FOI, and our independent analysis of a consultant’s report done for the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas days before Premier Clark announced the Prosperity Fund in February 2013, suggest that might be the case. The documents (download from link at end of story) suggest that an initiative to produce reports from independent consultants who would validate the potential for large revenues and massive job creation from LNG projects was launched only a month before Premier Clark announced the Prosperity Fund. The initiative appears to have been overseen by Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance Doug Foster. Foster outsourced the work to three private firms and delivered the numbers for Clark’s speech only days before it was made. Foster appears to have been reporting to Neil Sweeney, Deputy Minister, Corporate Policy in the Premier’s Office. The report that provided the numbers was authored by Grant Thornton LLP (download from link at end of story), a prestigious accountancy firm with world-wide operations. Grant Thornton’s report allowed the Premier to say in her February 2013 throne speech, “LNG development is poised to trigger approximately $1 trillion in cumulative GDP within British Columbia over the next 30 years and that means more than $100 billion will flow directly to the Prosperity Fund. Province wide, LNG is expected to create on average 39,000 annual direct, indirect and induced full-time jobs during a nine-year construction period. As well, there could be as many as 75,000 full-time jobs required once all LNG plants are in full operation.” Was the report credible? Before I tell you exactly what was in those emails, let me tell you why we were looking for them and how they came into our possession. Back in February 2013, all we knew was what the Premier said in her speech. For many of us it was the first time we had heard “LNG.” After Clark’s government had delivered its election budget, it released two reports—one authored by Grant Thornton and the other by Ernst & Young—that purported to validate the LNG revenue projections underpinning Clark’s Prosperity Fund. Oddly enough, those reports didn’t contain any job creation numbers. Throughout the subsequent election campaign, Clark had repeatedly stressed her plan would create “100,000 jobs for BC families.” But where did those jobs come from? After the election, inquiries to the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas about the LNG job figures used by Clark revealed that a third report, also by Grant Thornton, had provided the mathematical substance for the previously released studies of potential LNG revenues. But this report had been secreted away. There wasn’t a single reference to it in BC media coverage of the election. The Ministry sent us a link to its hiding place. After we read the report, which had the deceptively simple title Employment Impact Review, Focus filed an FOI for the record of communications between the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas and Grant Thornton as they developed the study. The report contained many warnings to the reader that it was based entirely on assumptions provided by “the Province and its advisors.” We wondered who those “advisors” were and whether the Province and its advisors had pushed the process toward some desired outcome. There was good reason to believe they had. Grant Thornton had arrived at questionable conclusions in its report. For example, it had checked the validity of a key assumption provided to them by the Province and its advisors by comparing it with the Australia Pacific LNG project, which was being built in Queensland. Grant Thornton concluded the assumption was supported by the Australian numbers. There were, however, problems with how they applied the Australian comparison. In its commentary about the comparison, Grant Thornton noted the ratio of direct jobs to tonnes of product for BC was only “slightly higher” than the Australian case. “Overall,” they concluded, “the estimates are comparable.” Actually, the BC ratio is 36 percent higher than the Australian number. If BC’s significantly higher number had been adjusted to actually be “comparable,” 36 percent of the direct jobs in the assumption would have vanished. Another of those key assumptions was that a capital expenditure of $98 billion in BC would create the capacity to produce 82 megatonnes of LNG per year. That, too, seems to be unreasonable. Australia Pacific is a two-phase, $35 billion project expected to eventually produce 16 megatonnes annually. At that ratio of capacity per dollar of investment, the Province’s assumed $98 billion would only create capacity for 45 megatonnes per year. Yet Grant Thornton had accepted that $98 billion would build 82 megatonnes of capacity. Australia Pacific’s likely costs, by the way, are significantly lower than BC’s would be: Australia Pacific is building a substantially shorter pipeline and will sip on coal seam gas, not shale gas. Coal seam gas doesn’t require drilling horizontal wells and fracking, so the wells for Australia Pacific LNG are about one-third the cost of wells in northeast BC. Grant Thornton’s estimation of long-term employment is also puzzling. According to an extensive study by KPMG of the $35 billion Australia Pacific project, ongoing operations of the LNG plant would employ 325, the pipeline 20 and the gas fields 520. Extrapolating from that example, a $98 billion project in BC would create 910 long-term operational jobs at LNG plants, 56 pipeline jobs, and 1456 gas field extraction jobs. That’s direct, long-term employment. If the pertinent BC Stats Input/Output Model multipliers are applied to these long-term employment figures, the total number of long-term jobs—direct, indirect and induced—rises to 21,000. It’s difficult to see how Grant Thornton arrived at the conclusion $98 billion would bring 75,000 long-term full-time jobs to the province. It seemed possible, then, after analyzing the Grant Thornton study last May, that the process of creating the report might have been pushed to create a 100,000-jobs election platform rather than function as a careful and reasoned analysis of the potential for LNG to produce jobs in BC. If it was the former, had taxpayers paid for a Liberal campaign expense? If it was the latter, why had the jobs report been kept in a drawer during the election? FOI adventures We filed that FOI for communications between Ministry employees and Grant Thornton in May of 2013. But the FOI was assessed a very high fee by the Province, which Focus declined to pay. Our efforts to ask for fewer records were thwarted by a Ministry information gatekeeper who said he would help but didn’t. So we FOIed instead for records that should have been slam-dunk easy for the Ministry to find: the “Documents and information relied upon” listed in the Grant Thornton report. Most of the entries on that list had been provided, Grant Thornton said, by “the Province and its advisors.” It defined “Province” as “the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas.” We were again rebuffed by the Ministry’s information gatekeeper, who, this time, refused to respond to our request. To make a long story short, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner ordered the gatekeeper—under threat of a $13,000 fine—to release the record. The package we received in early February 2014 was surprising: It contained none of the “documents and information relied upon” by Grant Thornton. We protested. Then, through the mediation of OIPC, the Ministry revealed it had no such information in its custody and control. How could the Ministry not have the information Grant Thornton claimed the Ministry provided? What the Ministry seemed to have provided, however, were the communications we originally requested last May: emails between high-level employees of the Province, their “advisors,” and employees of Grant Thornton. Fifteen pages of the records were fully severed on the claim of “cabinet confidences.” The emails were copied from the files of Brian Hansen when he was Assistant Deputy Minister of Energy, Mines and Natural Gas. (Hansen is now Assistant Deputy Minister and Lead Negotiator, LNG Task Force, Ministry of Natural Gas Development). Hansen’s email record explains why his Ministry didn’t have the information Grant Thornton said the Ministry had provided: The information had come entirely from outside of government. Cooking with gas Hansen’s emails show that Assistant Deputy Minister of Finance Doug Foster first contacted Grant Thornton and Ernst & Young on or about January 11, 2013 to enlist their professional services in developing reports that would project revenues that might flow to the Province from an LNG industry in BC. About a week later, Foster realized employment projections would also be needed. So on Sunday, January 20, Foster emailed Patti Daum of Grant Thornton’s Vancouver office. Grant Thornton describe themselves as “a leading Canadian accounting and business advisory firm, providing audit, tax and advisory services to private and public organizations.” Foster asked Daum, “Is it possible that GT may be able to answer the following?” Foster wanted to know how many direct and indirect jobs might be created by “five to seven LNG plants/pipeline projects into the future.” Fifteen minutes later, Foster fired off another email, this time to André Powell, a partner in The Deetken Group, a business consultancy firm in Vancouver. Deetken describe themselves as providing “services to a broad range of private sector, venture capital and public sector organizations,” including “energy infrastructure and markets.” Foster’s email to Powell said, “You have been copied on my communiques to EY [Ernst & Young] and GT... Can you begin preparing presentations that combine the work of Deetken and those of EY and GT? think (in fact know) we will need these this week. Also, we will need to incorporate employment forecast to the extent that we can get these from third parties too. Can you let me know your thoughts?” Later that day, Powell emailed Foster: “...with respect to employment, we have estimates of direct labour (mostly from proponents) and have developed estimates of indirect and induced [jobs] using [input/output] multipliers. This analysis might be a good start and accelerator for EY and/or GT’s work. Happy to package this for them.” On January 23, following conference calls (referred to in the emails) involving Foster, Powell and Grant Thornton employees, Doug Bastin, a partner in Grant Thornton’s Vancouver office, emailed Powell an eight-point list of information he wanted, which included LNG plant sizes and capacities, production volume estimates, development costs, project timing, and direct, indirect and induced employment estimates. Note that Bastin asked Deetken for this fundamental information; he didn’t ask Foster or Hansen. But Bastin did copy his request to both Hansen and Foster. Later that day Powell emailed Bastin: “We are currently pulling this data together and will get it to you by end of today.” On January 26 Powell emailed Hansen with an update, noting: “With respect to employment, we had a call yesterday and we have provided additional details; also BC Stats are helping them; GT said they will shoot for Friday [February 1] next week for results.” Late on February 4, Powell, after considering Grant Thornton’s draft report, emailed Doug Foster four suggestions, copied to Hansen. Powell’s suggestions included: “We should remove all reference to ‘proponent’ information, this should be described as data provided by the Province and its advisors developed from industry benchmarks and other sources.” Powell added that removing all reference to proponent “should also apply to E&Y’s final report.” If any of Foster, Hansen or Bastin raised any objections to this apparent switch in the attribution of the source of some of the information Grant Thornton was using, it does not appear in the records Hansen provided. In the final report, as mentioned above, Grant Thornton credited assumptions and information to “the Province and its advisors.” Late on February 4, just 8 days before Premier Clark announced the Prosperity Fund, Hansen emailed Powell: “On the jobs and revenue and the GT and E&Y work, are we close to being [ready] to advance some validated metrics? I ask as there is a meeting tomorrow with folks from the centre around these metrics and I assume Doug [believed to be a reference to GT’s Doug Bastin] is close to finished.” Early the next day Powell replied to Hansen: “The GT labour market work is almost ready, we are on a call with them this morning to make some changes/updates to their work. EY is not intending to provide labour market forecasts. For your meeting this [morning], I would go with the GT numbers as provisional/work in progress.” Powell then listed numbers which are virtually identical to estimated LNG employment figures presented in Clark’s Speech from the Throne on February 12, and in the 2013-2014 BC Budget. Early on February 6, with less than a week before Clark would announce the Prosperity Fund, Deputy Minister to the Premier Neil Sweeney emailed Foster and Hansen and asked: “Guys, can we get the actual drafts from GT and the other folks?” Foster emailed back: “Neil, the drafts are in various stages and continue to evolve due to:” and then Foster listed three issues that were causing delays, including: “Reviews by them [presumably “them” refers to GT and E&Y] to ensure that details are removed to protect proponent information sources...” Who provided what to whom? Focus emailed Deetken’s André Powell, Grant Thornton’s Doug Bastin, and the Province’s Doug Foster questions about how the Grant Thornton reports were developed. Neither Bastin or Foster responded to emails. I asked Powell why he had suggested removing any reference to “proponent” information from the final reports and instead suggested attributing all information to “the Province and its advisers developed from industry benchmarks and other sources”. Powell said, “[T]he proponents did not provide information to GT and EY. To state otherwise in the final report would have been inaccurate and I therefore provided a corrected description for inclusion in the final document.” Powell added,“In providing information and assumptions to the consultants (GT and EY), Deetken considered a variety of sources. This included aggregated information from proponents, industry benchmarks and other research and analytics.” Powell explained that “Deetken used aggregated information collected on the Province’s behalf to assist it in evaluating other information it had already compiled as to reasonableness before passing specific assumptions to the consultants. The consultants [Grant Thornton and Ernst & Young] themselves were also free to accept or adjust such received information based on their own analysis and research of industry information.” Powell confirmed that “Deetken was not under contract with any LNG proponents or developers at the time the report was developed.” With the “Province” claiming it had none of the information Grant Thornton said it had, Deetken seems to be the sole source of information used by Grant Thornton, aside from their consideration of the Australia Pacific project. Deetken’s information, then, provided the fundamental basis for Clark’s Prosperity Fund and her successful election campaign. Powell’s explanation of why he wanted aggregated information from proponents to be given a more opaque attribution is that no specific information from individual proponents was included. Fair enough. But how could the public interest be served in this taxpayer-funded exercise without transparency and accountability? Asking Encana, for example, for objective information about how many drilling jobs an LNG industry would create is like asking Goldman Sachs whether reducing regulation of investment banking would be good for the economy. By disguising the source of the information, the exercise became political. And, as mentioned earlier, the numbers seem to have been manipulated, or "fudged," as British Columbians prefer to put it. Grant Thornton, Deetken and Foster seem to have created, intentionally or not, a “fudge-it budget” for LNG. For whose benefit were such arithmetical indiscretions performed? Well it wasn’t for Adrian Dix’s sake. Is fudging the numbers political activity? You might recall the scandal the Liberals were embroiled in just before the last election involving public service employees doing partisan work on the job. The Deputy Minister to the Premier John Dyble wrote a report about that affair in which he said the public service oath “expressly includes the Standards of Conduct, and requires public servants to conduct themselves in a manner that maintains and enhances the public’s trust and confidence in the public service.” The BC Standards of Conduct state, “Employees must not engage in political activities during working hours or use government facilities, equipment, or resources in support of these activities.” If a public service employee oversees development of a study, and if that study misrepresents the facts about the employment potential arising from LNG development in the province, and that misrepresentation then becomes the political position of the governing party seven days later—and the key component of their election campaign—was that employee engaging in political activity during working hours? Did he conduct himself in a way “that maintains and enhances the public’s trust and confidence in the public service”? This is a question that Premier Clark needs to answer, or democracy will continue to wither in BC. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

October 2013 The CRD’s own records show it failed to consult taxpayers on the financial impacts of its sewage treatment plan. That's contrary to provincial law. Was the Ministry of Environment napping on the job when it approved the CRD's plan? FOCUS RECENTLY FILED an FOI for the CRD’s record of public consultation on its $783 million sewage treatment plan. We did this so we could compare what the CRD invited the public to provide input on against what seems to be the minimum legal requirement for consultation. The results suggest the CRD has, in significant ways, been avoiding its legal responsibility to consult the public on this massive expenditure of public money. Moreover, giving such scant attention to public consultation would only be possible if the Ministry of Environment—the regulator watching over the process—has been sleeping on the job or looking the other way. To help you understand why such an exercise might be in order, let’s go back to July 2010, when the CRD advertised in a local paper two “open houses” to be held in Esquimalt. Presented as “Esquimalt Community Engagement,” the CRD advertisement said it was “moving forward with a new system configuration for wastewater treatment in the Core Area Municipalities.” The ad invited Esquimalt residents “to learn more about the chosen treatment system and give feedback and suggestions on mitigation and community benefits.” Actually, Esquimalt was being dumped on. For over three years the CRD had pursued various plans in which three or more treatment plants were to be distributed around the region—a sharing of the burden of hosting treatment infrastructure. Then, suddenly, the CRD switched to a single treatment plant—in Esquimalt. This new configuration had been approved by the CRD’s sewage committee in a single meeting without any prior public notice or consultation. That this happened shortly after a round of frosty public consultation had taken place over the location of a proposed treatment plant in an affluent neighbourhood near UVic did not go unnoticed in Esquimalt. At the open houses in Esquimalt, the CRD asked attendees to fill in a feedback form. One of the questions on that form was: “How can the CRD be a good neighbour?” Naturally, the CRD received a talking-to: “Consult the public prior to making decisions. Stop changing numbers to suit your need to push the project through. Listen to us. Do not use falsehoods. Do not mislead the public. Do not spend taxpayers’ money on a one-sided campaign.” And that was just one person. Another chided, “A good neighbour would ask the public for input before it decides on such a huge project. A good neighbour would not spend the public’s money before asking. It is impossible to trust such a body of people who ignore the wishes of the residents who will be most affected.” Some commenters didn’t bother to answer the CRD’s question and led with their own: “Isn’t Esquimalt in the CRD? When did we separate? Regulation without representation is fascism. Until and unless the CRD becomes a wholly elected body, it is tyranny. Consult ex camera on all, ALL, policy issues, development plans, infrastructure proposals and regulation suggestions BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION. Investigate the meaning of the word ‘democratic.’ Stand for office or close shop.” In response to that “good neighbour” question, 60 percent of the commenters poked hard at the CRD’s performance on public consultation. That wasn’t surprising considering the CRD Board of Directors had already approved the $783 million plan two weeks beforehand, and by the time of the open houses that plan was sitting on the desk of then Environment Minister Barry Penner, awaiting his thumbs-up. That doesn’t sound like genuine consultation. In fact, the CRD didn’t even want to be in the room. Esquimalt Mayor Barb Desjardins, the municipality’s representative on the CRD sewage committee, recalled that “it was only because of my protests and a minority of the [sewage] committee supporting me that the CRD agreed to do the two sessions in Esquimalt.” Desjardins said, “I felt the CRD must present their decision to Esquimalt, and insisted that it be done as soon as possible. But let’s be clear that these were not, in any way, ‘community consultation.’” The deep distrust expressed in the comments gathered by the CRD at those open houses has since grown into community-wide discontent. The CRD’s retreat last summer from a new proposal to locate a sewage sludge processing plant in the midst of a residential neighbourhood in Esquimalt has done little to bridge the gap. Instead, people have been wondering out loud if provincial Environment Minister Mary Polak should call a time-out, bring the CRD back to consult more comprehensively with the people, and allow time for creating a better plan. There is a legal avenue for Polak to do that. Will she take it? Was the CRD’s consultation with the public so bad that it demands redress? What the Environmental Management Act requires Creation of a liquid waste management plan like the CRD’s is governed by BC’s Environmental Management Act. The Ministry of Environment administers this law and has developed guidelines for regional districts on how to develop such plans (Interim Guidelines for Preparing Liquid Waste Management Plans). On the subject of “Consultation Process” the Guidelines are squishy, perhaps intentionally so. “Should” is used as often as “must.” So definitive statements about what the guidelines intend are open for debate. So let’s back up a bit. The Act says, “A [regional district] must provide for a process for comprehensive review and consultation with the public respecting all aspects of the development, amendment and final content of a waste management plan that applies to that [regional district].” The ministry’s Guidelines explains why that “process for comprehensive review and consultation with the public” is so important. The document states: “Under the Community Charter and Local Government Act, electoral approval must be sought for any borrowing associated with capital works. Because the Environmental Management Act waives these requirements for elector approval for any borrowing necessary to implement [a liquid waste management plan], it is important that the public has an opportunity to provide input with respect to proposed financing.” In other words, unlike for borrowing for other capital projects, the CRD doesn’t have to seek permission from electors—through a referendum or an alternative approval process—to borrow for a sewage treatment system. Instead, the Environmental Management Act commands “comprehensive review and consultation” with electors before a plan for a sewage treatment system can be approved by the minister. The Guidelines further direct regional districts to consult on the financial impact to taxpayers. Toward that end, they state: “The possibility of senior government grants and the use of development charges to reduce capital costs should be presented for comparison with the no grant scenario. As a minimum, for a typical residential taxpayer, the added capital debt repayment and user fees associated with the Stage 2 options and the selected Stage 3 option should be presented.” (The “Stage 3 option” in this case is the plan for a single treatment plant at McLoughlin Point in Esquimalt.) Did the CRD give the public an “opportunity to provide input” on any of those aspects of the financial impact on taxpayers? The record of public consultation I posed that question to Saanich Councillor Judy Brownoff, who was the chairperson of the CRD committee overseeing development of the liquid waste management plan in 2010 when Penner approved the McLoughlin plan. Brownoff said, “Consultation was held specifically on procurement method and models... and there was public input, including verbatim comments in reports.” Brownoff was referring to two open houses and a meeting of her committee, held in February 2010, that sought public input “on issues and concerns relating to procurement.” The CRD had asked for public and stakeholder input on various procurement models, such as “design-bid-build” and “design-build-operate-maintain.” But the sessions did not provide “an opportunity for the public to provide input with respect to proposed financing.” I asked Victoria Councillor Geoff Young if he was aware of the requirement imposed by the Environmental Management Act to formally consult and review with the public on the financial implications to taxpayers of the McLoughlin plan. Young was the Chairperson of the CRD at the time the McLoughlin plan was approved by Penner. Young simply said “ don’t have much to add to [the] response Judy sent you.” Another requirement for public consultation set out by the Ministry of Environment’s Guidelines is that a record of consultation must be kept. The CRD has done a good job of making that record “available for public scrutiny,” as directed by the Guidelines. When so scrutinized and checked against the record Focus obtained by FOI, it becomes clear that the CRD never set up an “opportunity” in which they reviewed the proposed financing with the public, and the public was never specifically invited to provide input with respect to the proposed financing. The Guidelines’ section on public consultation notes that “[a]pportionment of costs to existing users and to future development should be equitable.” This is, arguably, a direction to local governments to consult with the public on how the excess capacity of a proposed treatment system is allocated. After all, those allocations would have a direct impact on costs to taxpayers. But they would also have a profound influence on where future development in a region is possible. I wrote extensively on that issue here last month; the CRD and its member municipalities decided how and where to allocate that excess capacity without any public input. The Guidelines also provide direction to regional districts on consultation around “social impacts.” If you live relatively close to where a treatment plant is proposed, for example, and you might be directly subjected to “odour nuisance, noise, traffic, air quality and visual impact” as a result, then you need to be consulted. The CRD has a mixed record here. They did consult with the neighbourhood near UVic before finalizing their plan. They did not consult with their Esquimalt neighbours, nor with people living nearby in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood, before finalizing their plan for McLoughlin Point. Besides the question of whether the CRD consulted or not, there’s the issue of whether they listened to what the public said and incorporated that into their plan. No doubt the CRD took heed of much of what they were told. But there’s at least one example—and it’s an important one—where the official consultation process seems to have been overshadowed by unofficial consultation. This is the question of whether the cost of a treatment system is the most important consideration to the public. The CRD did official consultation on this in 2009, in a series of “community dialogues” in Victoria, Saanich and Westshore. These dialogues included a survey of what people valued most. For example, the CRD asked people to rate the importance of six characteristics of a wastewater treatment plant. The people surveyed gave the lowest rating to “The plant was constructed for the lowest possible cost.” And they gave the highest rating to “The plant includes technologies for maximum water and energy reuse.” Other results from those surveys supported the general idea that the environmental impact of the treatment system was more important to the public than the cost of the system. Yet Young recently told Focus, “Taxpayers throughout the region have made it abundantly clear they do not welcome paying for sewage treatment costs.” And Brownoff said, “When I was chair of the committee the focus was always on limiting costs of the project while meeting regulatory requirements and [to] provide resource recovery where it made sense. We heard through our many discussions with the public, either at the committee meetings (two a month), through presentations at various groups, or through our established consultation process, that costs were the biggest issue to manage.” Did Young and Brownoff and other CRD directors listen to what the public told them? We don’t really know. One thing is certain though: the record shows the public was never given an opportunity to be informed about the benefits and costs of tertiary treatment, even though public preference, as determined by the CRD’s official consultation, was for that level of treatment. The avenue for appeal The Environmental Management Act takes away electors’ right to say “No” to a capital project that provides sewage treatment. It replaces that right with a command to a regional district to create opportunities to comprehensively review and consult with the public on several aspects of its plan for a sewage treatment project, and to keep a record of that consultation. So what happens if the regional district doesn’t provide the opportunities for that “process for comprehensive review and consultation”? The Environmental Management Act provides a recourse to protect the public’s right to be informed and consulted. The Act states, “The minister may not approve a waste management plan unless the minister is satisfied that there has been adequate public review and consultation with respect to the development, amendment and final content of the waste management plan.” But former Minister Penner did approve the plan. What recourse is left to those feeling less than comprehensively consulted? Although Penner approved Amendment 8 of the CRD’s plan, does current Environment Minister Mary Polak have any avenue to address the evident lack of consultation with taxpayers on the final content of the CRD’s treatment plan? In response to that question, an Environment Ministry spokesperson noted: “During the plan amendment, the CRD undertook extensive public consultation, as required by the Environmental Management Act. In addition, further consultation was completed with Esquimalt, with regard to the selection of McLoughlin Point for the central sewage facility. As you note, the minister may not approve a waste management plan unless the minister is satisfied that there has been adequate public review and consultation. Former Minister Penner indicated his approval of the consultation on the final content of the plan when he approved Amendment 8 on August 25, 2010.” For those hoping to hear that the Environment Minister will intervene, no luck. But Polak’s office didn’t say she was satisfied, either. Polak does have the power under the Environmental Management Act to cancel the CRD’s waste management plan. Should there be a pause for further consultation? Judy Brownoff said there will be some additional consultation: “[The] CRD will be continuing with various neighbourhood engagements depending on what and where a component of the project is located.” The CRD promised Penner in 2010 that it would “Engage neighbourhoods where treatment plants, pump stations, storage tanks or major pipelines are to be constructed in interactive workshops regarding the location, design, construction and operation of the proposed facilities, and use general public consultation...on broader issues.” Brownoff explained why that hasn’t happened yet: “The Committee made the decision (when I was chair) not to ‘invest’ any more money on this project until the funding agreements had been finalized, and that led to no more ‘public meetings, informational newsletters, etc’.” But “neighbourhood engagement” is unlikely to produce the depth of consultation and change of plan that Barb Desjardins wants to see. The memory of the CRD short-changing her community in 2010 still rankles. That, compounded by the Viewfield Road fiasco, has damaged the CRD’s relationship with her community. “Once the trust of a community is lost it is very hard to regain. It takes significant work and requires going back to where you lost the trust. The CRD has not been willing to do this,” she said. She noted the lack of clarity in the law about what aspects of a liquid waste management plan require public consultation: “It is not clear what criteria the Ministry used to approve the plans. There is nothing in the Environmental Management Act that makes reference, directly or indirectly, to such criteria.” Although Desjardins feels Esquimalt residents haven’t been adequately consulted, just going back and doing more of the same won’t work. “I would like to have seen greater Provincial assistance in directing this process,” she said. “The CRD has not done public consultation well and this feeling of unease is growing in the public. [Minister] Polak could amend the liquid waste management plan under section 24 (6) of the Environmental Management Act to state that Amendment No.8 is no longer valid until public consultation is completed…The whole process has been tainted,” she said. “It can’t practically be redone. However there is time to develop a better plan and meet the deadlines.” She has a simple, two-step program by which the CRD could do a reality check with the public: “First, the CRD should notify every household in the Core Area by mail about the design and cost of the project. With a nearly three-year window available, the CRD could [then] hold a referendum on whether electors are satisfied with this plan or want the CRD to look at the alternatives.” Desjardins declined to elaborate on the state of negotiations between the CRD and Esquimalt over the latter’s rezoning of the CRD’s McLoughlin Point property. Esquimalt rezoned the property, as requested by the CRD, but attached conditions to the rezoning that the CRD says it cannot accommodate. “These conversations are ongoing,” she said of the negotiations. Oak Bay-Gordon Head MLA Andrew Weaver agrees with Desjardins that a better plan is needed. “There are many, many people in Oak Bay-Gordon Head who have expressed concern over this project for the reason that they want sewage to be treated [to a tertiary standard]. By and large, people accept we need to treat sewage, but they realize that this $783 million megaproject will essentially take away any appetite for future capital investment and will not actually treat the existing problem. It will only delay that until sometime in the future—because the requirements are for a secondary system as opposed to potential tertiary treatment.” Weaver’s constituents’ continuing concern about the inadequate treatment being proposed is another signal the CRD has not listened to what the public has been saying. As mentioned earlier, the CRD was advised by the public in early community consultation that including technologies for maximum water and energy reuse were more important than keeping costs as low as possible. Tertiary treatment removes contaminants such as pharmaceuticals, and would produce abundant reusable water. Weaver confirmed that Polak and Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development Coralee Oakes have told him there’s time to develop a better plan: “Both have said if they were asked for an extension of time to 2020, the money would be available and they would be fine in meeting the federal deadline. So there is time to actually do this properly, to go out and do an extensive taxation consultation, one that explores distributed systems, explores PPPs, explores tertiary versus secondary and the additional add-on costs.” Weaver thinks the CRD is missing out on opportunities for collaboration: “I’ll give you an example,” he says. “Someone should be talking with UVic; they are going into consultation about having a biomass facility of some form, whether it be anaerobic digestion or combustion; they’re talking about doing that now…Would it make sense to have an aerobic digestion sewage system, or a little tertiary system right there? This is the kind of thing that should be happening. But it’s not because [the CRD] are in rush mode now. And the sad reality is we’re not going to be dealing with the problem that exists; we’re just delaying it and we’re spending $783 million in the process.” Should Polak intervene? Weaver doesn’t think so. “The minister is loathe to get involved because it’s really not the minister’s job to get involved in this. It’s the minister’s job to ensure the process has been followed...The minister should not come in, for example, and order Esquimalt to have the facility built there, although the minister could. I think what the minister should do is proactively switch the deadline in light of this big hullabaloo that’s going on in the CRD… And she should take a very hard look at whether or not the actual consultation process, as required by law, has been met.” Informed of Desjardins’ call for a referendum, Weaver said, “Totally in favour of a referendum, just as Regina did!” Is there a better way to do public consultation? How could a community spend seven years and close to $65 million—most of that on planning—yet still come up with a plan that few people trust is the right thing to do? Municipal amalgamation beforehand might have made a difference; the stresses created by having eight different and unequal political cultures in the same room, each trying to avoid getting stuck with too much of the unwanted infrastructure that goes along with sewage treatment, may have wreaked havoc on common sense. But there’s no reason to believe amalgamation is just around the corner. So what happens when the next big infrastructure need comes along? Will the CRD use the same kind of public consultation and get the same kind of result? I asked Barb Desjardins if she had any suggestions on how to create more authentic dialogue between local government and citizens on such contentious issues in the future. “Engage people before final decisions, not after them,” she said. “Good public process and honest engagement take time. Policy decisions that limit—like never considering expropriation, never considering the use of ALR land—must be reviewed throughout the process to ensure they are still relevant. Respect the people who are paying; they should have more say in what is being put in their backyard. Decisions should be made and heavily weighted to what the local community wants and can support, not what other municipalities want.” Late last year Victoria Councillor Lisa Helps set up five “citizen budget workshops” to give her ideas that would help the City keep a check on escalating costs. “The purpose,” she said, “was to gain citizen input at the beginning of the City’s budget process, so that this could feed into decisions I’d be making at the council table in the fall.” How would she create more authentic dialogue between government and citizens on contentious issues? “Victoria’s residents and business owners have terrific, creative, innovative ideas,” Helps said. “These ideas need to be sought at the beginning of any new project through opportunities for meaningful dialogue. This does not mean politicians directing staff to trot out with shiny billboards proposing a plan. This requires staff, politicians, residents and business owners to sit side by side, around tables, sharing ideas, being willing to be moved and to develop a better plan than each party would individually. This is good, old-fashioned deliberative democracy at work. It takes time. It asks each person to come to the table willing to be moved by what they hear. And this kind of democratic process creates lasting, resilient change because people are part of that change from the outset.” Alan Dolan, of Alan Dolan & Associates, is a facilitator and community engagement consultant. He suggests the CRD might have done better had it used the approach taken by the BC government to develop an option for electoral reform in 2002. “The Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform was comprised of two randomly selected citizens (one man and one woman) from each of the province’s 79 electoral districts, plus two Aboriginal members. The Assembly began with a ‘learning phase,’ where it received experts and held public hearings so members could understand the different electoral systems in usage around the world and how they affected the political process. Then members deliberated over which electoral system to recommend. Finally, the Assembly decided they would recommend a Single Transferable Vote system (STV) and the Assembly’s findings were presented in a report to the BC legislature.” Like Desjardins and Helps, Dolan acknowledges the deliberations of a citizens’ assembly take time. But, he says, “The CRD process has already taken a great deal of time. Using groups of ordinary citizens has a number of distinct advantages. Process is more democratic and representative of the community at large. The International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) says, ‘No other process takes such care to accurately reflect the public.’ Discussions are not swayed by special interests and powerful stakeholders. Members become very well informed on the subject matter. When options are presented to the community, members of the public have more trust in the information. Process allows the assembly to look at alternative ideas from all over the world, not just the ideas of CRD’s engineers or its consultants.” The path forward While there's always hope governments will behave differently in the future and the public will be included as a full partner in the business of the people, that's not much comfort for those unhappy with the CRD's plan right now. The problem seems to boil down to this: Esquimalt doesn’t want the CRD to build a treatment centre at McLoughlin Point. And that location has problems the rest of the community should be concerned about: It’s too small to include the necessary biosolids processing function, it’s too small for future tertiary treatment, and it’s too small for long-term population growth. If McLoughlin goes ahead, another site will have to be found later on. At the same time, the CRD has said it will not expropriate land or use land in the Agricultural Land Reserve for a treatment facility, thereby making it impossible for it to find a larger, more suitable location. Does that self-imposed limitation really make sense? And the CRD has not provided taxpayers with carefully considered information about the benefits and costs of a higher level of treatment. Would that higher level cost each household an additional $200 a year? $500 a year? $1000 a year? The community has been asking the CRD to provide that information to taxpayers before proceeding any further. So far the CRD has not been listening. The CRD could hold a referendum in which the public can express support for the current plan or support for a closer look at alternatives.There is time to do this. The Province has signalled the CRD that it will wait for it to resolve these issues with the community. It’s never too late to start consulting with taxpayers. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

April 2013 Did Victoria City Manager Gail Stephens misrepresent the financial state of the Johnson Street Bridge project before the 2011 civic election? LAST MONTH I wrote here about the circumstances surrounding the City of Victoria’s efforts last year to bar three people (freelance journalist Ross Crockford, Focus editor Leslie Campbell, and myself) from obtaining certain records the City apparently wished to keep secret. The City had applied under a rarely-used provision of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to effectively block access to those records. The City abandoned that process once the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner unexpectedly called an expedited hearing of the City’s Section 43 application. I ended last month’s story by telling you that a portion of the records being sought had finally been released to Ross Crockford—10 months after he first requested them—through provisions of FIPPA. The information contained in that release—which has been dubbed “the smoking gun”—raises serious questions about the veracity of a public statement made by the City’s top executive just before the 2011 civic election. The following series of events have been reconstructed from that release, other FOI releases, and public records. AT A MEETING of Victoria City Council on October 6, 2011, City Manager Gail Stephens introduced an update on the then two-year-old Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project by noting, “interest in the bridge remains very high.” She went on to tell councillors, media and members of the public, “A lot of work is being done to prepare for the construction, but it’s all behind-the-scenes kinds of work, and not clearly visible to the public. However this preparatory work is critical to the successful delivering of the project, that I’m pleased to note continues to be within the budget of $77 million and the March 2016 timeline.” Near the end of her short address, Stephens announced the project had received confirmation of an $8 million grant from the CRD which, she said, “can be applied to reduce the amount of money we have to borrow” to complete the project. That the project was on budget and on schedule and was so well-managed that the City wouldn’t need to borrow as deeply as previously thought must have sounded like beautiful music to the ears of Victoria Mayor Dean Fortin. After all, he would soon be pounding the pavement and knocking on doors in search of votes so he could retain his $100,000-a-year job in the upcoming civic election, just 45 days away. Stephens’ public reassurances would surely help him in that effort. Indeed, two days after the meeting, Fortin wrote on his Facebook page: “The good news Victoria City Council received this Thursday is that the amount we need to borrow for bridge construction has dropped 8 million due to a federal gas tax grant administered by the CRD.” But as buoying as this news was for Fortin and his pro-replacement councillors, it came with a potentially serious problem attached for Stephens, who is a certified general accountant. As such she was required, as stated in her professional association’s Code of Ethical Principles, to “not be associated with information which the Member knows, or should know, to be false or misleading, whether by statement or omission.” And her “within the budget of $77 million” statement, along with her inference that the City would be able “to reduce the amount of money we have to borrow” was directly at odds with information and recommendations given to Stephens by the City’s finance department months before. THE JOHNSON STREET BRIDGE Replacement Project Steering Committee, hereafter referred to as the Steering Committee, was established by the project’s Charter in January 2011. To borrow from the Charter’s bureaucratese, the Steering Committee occupies the position in the accountability structure between City council and the City engineer running the project. That is to say, the Steering Committee controls what information is passed on to councillors. And as Stephens had been at the helm of that committee since its inception, she was the gatekeeper that separated councillors from the rest of City staff working on the project back in 2011. So when the City’s Director of Finance Brenda Warner first approached the Steering Committee in the spring of 2011 with concerns about the project’s budget, Stephens was guarding the pass. Warner had identified millions of dollars in project-related costs that were not included in the $77-million project budget approved by City councillors before the referendum in 2010. But that was the only approved budget that she could assign those costs to, and they were steadily eating up the project’s contingency fund. Warner had initially been assured councillors would be informed of these costs at a council meeting scheduled for July 2011. But after attending a Steering Committee meeting on June 24, 2011, where she provided an account of these costs, she was told by Stephens that councillors would not, in fact, be informed until October, when new drawings and a project cost update were to be completed by the City’s consultant, MMM Group, a private engineering and project management company. An hour after that June 24 meeting, Warner was told by the City’s JSB Project Director Mike Lai that “we will need to strategize with the Steering Committee on the timing of that update.” Why the secrecy and strategizing? Why not just tell councillors the truth about the project and get their input and direction? Well, that would have dumped the millions in unaccounted costs into public view just before an election, and the Steering Committee had previously identified a “change of council” in an election as a definite risk facing the project. Moreover, both Lai and Stephens were aware of other serious problems: the overall cost had been badly underestimated in 2010 and now the project team was furiously reworking the design to contain costs. But keeping a lid on costs also meant reductions in the functionality, expected life, amenities and architectural qualities of the bridge, and that could result in a legal challenge to the referendum that approved borrowing for the project. As well, the lifting mechanism had undergone a radical design change, necessitating additional construction cost increases. Revealing all this at the wrong time—especially before an election—might force a public reconsideration of the entire project. A few days after that June 24 meeting, Warner, perhaps sensing the project had gone beyond the point where council approval ought to be sought, asked Acting Assistant Director of Finance Troy Restell to put together a detailed account of the unbudgeted costs. On August 12, 2011, Restell, a certified management accountant who had been with the City since 2006, sent a memo to Lai that was circulated to Stephens. Restell’s memo stated, in part, “$5.2 million of construction/ design and City costs have been identified that are in addition to the original $77 million budget…The total revised estimate for the Johnson Street Bridge project is $82.2 million.” Restell went on to say, “It is recommended that council be advised, based on the attached analysis, of items not included in the budget that will be required to complete the project.” Smoking gun: Troy Restell's August 12, 2011 memo Two months later, Stephens made her “continues to be within the budget of $77 million” statement. Was there something that happened in between to reduce costs? No. Key City staff had to be aware that costs were on the rise. Look at what happened two days after Victoria electors had cast their votes. On November 21, MMM Group, the company providing the City with project management and engineering for the new bridge, delivered to the City a document called the Project Definition Report that showed construction costs had climbed $5.85 million above and beyond the costs outlined in the Restell memo, bringing the total cost estimate to over $88 million. Originally, this report and budget update had been planned for release before the election. Its delivery two days after the election was likely no coincidence. And the cost escalations weren’t over. On January 6, 2012, Assistant Director of Finance Susanne Thompson estimated costs at $91.25 million; she noted that the project had used up all but $660,000 of its $8.9 million contingency; and she recommended council be informed. By mid-January the cost was set at $92.8 million. So at the time when Stephens said the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million,” she should have been aware that costs on various fronts were escalating rapidly. None of the cost escalations were revealed to councillors or the public until March 2012. Focus asked Stephens for an explanation of why the warnings and recommendations of Warner and Restell, made months before her October 6 statement, were apparently not factored into her announcement that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million.” Here is Stephens’ full response: “Based on the preliminary information I had received as of October 2011, I believed the project was within the approved budget. In preparation for a budget update for council, I instructed staff to do a full review of the costs and funding related to the project, and at the same time the project team was finalizing the 30 percent design drawings necessary for the Project Definition Report [delivered November 21, 2011]. Upon completion of further engineering and financial analysis, I was confident in the information and a council meeting was scheduled for early March [2012]. The complete information was presented to all of council at the same time. Information is brought to council when it is complete and the proper due diligence has been conducted.” I asked Stephens, again, if the “preliminary information” on which she based her “within budget” public statement had included Warner’s and Restell’s information. She replied, “The preliminary information I received was incomplete and was related to pre-construction costs. In addition, the Project Definition Report and value engineering had not been completed, which significantly informs budget analysis. Complete and tested budget information was presented to council when the necessary due diligence had been completed.” What Stephens seems to be saying is that she could not have declared the project over-budget at that October 6 meeting until a number of things had happened, roughly summarized by her expression “due diligence.” But shouldn’t that same logic have applied to a declaration that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million”? Stephens’ decision to characterize the financial state of the project as rosy had real consequences. Most obviously, voters were given an inaccurate picture of a controversial project just as they were being asked to make decisions about how to cast their ballots in an election. I recently asked Victoria Councillor Lisa Helps, a first-time candidate in that election, what she had experienced during her campaign in terms of the bridge. Was it an issue? Helps said, “When I was door knocking during the 2011 election campaign, the single issue that I heard most about was the bridge. I’m not saying that everyone on every door step mentioned it. But uninvited and unprovoked, people wanted to comment on the bridge—on the public engagement strategy around it, on the cost, on the necessity of one big infrastructure project when there were so many other important things the City could spend their money on. I’m not sure how much the bridge actually swayed people on voting day, but there was certainly a lot of discussion—and more critique than praise—in the months leading up to it.” I asked Stephens if she had withheld the information Warner and Restell had provided her in order that the escalating cost of the bridge project did not become an issue during the 2011 civic election. She responded, “Civic elections do not factor into the timing of staff reports to council.” Stephens did not respond to questions about whether Mayor Fortin had been informed of the information provided to her by Warner and Restell, or whether Fortin had advised Stephens to make public Warner’s and Restell’s information on unbudgeted costs. Fortin did not respond to emailed questions. WAS STEPHENS SIMPLY exercising due diligence when she claimed the project was on budget? Or did she know costs were escalating and misled voters before an election? And why does it matter? I asked Colin Macleod this last question. Macleod is a UVic associate professor in law and philosophy whose research focuses on issues in contemporary moral, political and legal theory, including democratic ethics. He is also the associate editor of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Macleod explained that civil servants play a crucial role in facilitating the proper functioning of democratic governance by providing accurate information: “Such information is relevant to democratic deliberation amongst citizens and politicians about the wisdom of different policies and projects…If civil servants distort or withhold relevant information bearing on matters of public interest, they frustrate deliberation by the public. The confidence that citizens should have in civil service and the government is threatened by deception or misrepresentation. In the absence of some genuine emergency that somehow posed a significant threat to the immediate health or safety of the community, it is hard to imagine a case in which a municipal civil servant would be justified in knowingly misleading the public.” Ross Crockford has carefully scrutinized the bridge project for the past three years as a director of the watchdog group johnsonstreetbridge.org. He was told about the “smoking gun” by a concerned City Hall insider. I asked Crockford what action he thought was needed so that the theoretical accountability that’s at the heart of access to information laws could be turned into actual accountability—a very tricky process. “Normally, a city manager would have to answer to mayor and council,” Crockford said. “In this case, though, they could be in a perceived conflict of interest: the members of council running for re-election in 2011 may have benefitted from voters getting a false impression that the project was ‘within the budget of $77 million.’ So I think the mayor and council need to appoint an independent inquiry. I believe one is needed here if we’re ever going to find out what’s really going on at City Hall.” David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

March 2013 Information obtained through three FOIs raises serious questions about how the City of Victoria's FOI office is being run. That office's attempt to block Focus' access to City of Victoria records last fall was misrepresented to City councillors, and the City prepared no evidence for the hearing called by BC's Information and Privacy Commissioner. IT'S A SUNDAY MORNING, around 10 o’clock. I’m sitting at a table, scissors in hand. CBC’s The Sunday Edition is on the radio. There’s a small pile of papers in front of me, the results of an FOI request to the City of Victoria. They contain information that is out of chronological order, and I’m trying to sort out who did what and when they did it. Hence the scissors. I’m cutting out individual emails and arranging them on the table so I can follow conversations among City officials about why they applied to BC Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham for a Section 43 authorization to ignore FOI requests from Focus. On the radio Michael Enright is interviewing Canada’s Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault. She’s telling him, “The reason we have access to information laws is so that citizens can hold their government accountable and they can meaningfully participate in democracy by having information about the policies and the programs that governments put forward.” Snnnnip. I’m dividing the individual emails and other documents into two separate themes: One group is related to the question of whether City officials fully informed the mayor and councillors about what they were doing; the issue of withholding vital information from citizens’ elected representatives arises again and again at Victoria City Hall. Was it at play in this story? The other group of emails shows the extent to which City officials were having difficulty responding to FOI requests just before the Section 43 application. The official justification for the application was that a small group of people, which included me, had overused the City’s FOI resources. Was this true? Snnnnnip. Back on the radio, Enright says to Legault: “Information equals power, and governments don’t want to share that power, do they?” Legault responds, “Information is power, but access delayed is access denied. When information about sensitive files is not disclosed in a timely fashion, it prevents Canadians from holding their governments to account in the way they respond to crises, in the way they spend money in responding to crises.” While I snip, Enright and Legault talk about all the ways in which the federal government avoids meeting its legal obligations to provide access to its records: long delays, excessive fees, redactions based on unproven exemptions, claims that no records exist—all of which I have experienced at the hands of City Hall. Legault tells Enright that Canada has lately been ranked number 55 of 93 countries in terms of its performance on access to information. “Canadians should be angry,” she tells him. “The law is there. It’s really a fundamental democratic right that we have. In other countries, access to information is considered a fundamental human right linked to freedom of expression. I think Canadians should not be complacent about the fact that our government is not putting [in] enough resources and it’s not managing the access to information systems such that it delivers on its obligations to Canadians.” Snnnnnnnip. After separating the emails into the themes I want to examine, I arrange them in chronological order. This is the slow, tedious work that can’t be avoided if our individual right to access government records is actually going to materialize into the lofty goal set out by access laws. Or, as Legault put it: “so that citizens can hold their government accountable...” GOVERNMENTS CAN ROB CITIZENS of their ability to meaningfully participate in democracy in more than one way. It happens, for instance, when politicians neglect to tell us something important during an election and then later surprise us with some bad news. Gordon Campbell’s Liberal government did that in the 2009 provincial election with the HST. Before the election the Liberals secretly discussed implementing it. After the election they brought it in. This story is about City of Victoria bureaucrats who similarly robbed citizens of their ability to meaningfully participate in democracy. They did this at three levels. First, they withheld information—“the smoking gun”—about the true cost of replacing the Johnson Street Bridge before the 2011 civic election. They knew as early as June 2011 that the true cost of the project would be much higher than estimated, and they kept that information to themselves until after the election. In doing so they prevented citizens from participating meaningfully in democracy. Secondly, when media tried to access the records that would allow that issue to be fully explored, the same bureaucrats invoked a section of a law that was created to ensure accountability to instead prevent accountability. They once again robbed citizens of their ability to participate meaningfully in democracy. Thirdly, the bureaucrats misinformed elected representatives about what they were doing, again robbing citizens of their ability to meaningfully participate in democracy. Let’s start with the bureaucrats misinforming councillors about their Section 43 application and then circle back to the smoking gun. ON AUGUST 7, 2012, City of Victoria Corporate Administrator Robert Woodland sent out two communications related to the topic at hand. First he sent a letter to BC Information and Privacy Commissioner Elizabeth Denham. That was followed by a memo to the mayor and City councillors. He copied City Solicitor Tom Zworski on both. In the memo to councillors, Woodland noted, “I have limited resources available to respond to these applicants’ record requests and still provide service to other record applicants.” He went on to tell them, “I am asking the Commissioner to limit the number of requests from the applicants to one request at a time.” To the mayor and councillors that no doubt sounded perfectly reasonable. But in his three-page letter to Denham, Woodland requested authorization under Section 43 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act “to disregard requests from David Broadland, Leslie Campbell, Ross Crockford and any persons acting on their behalf (collectively the ‘Applicants’).” Woodland detailed for Denham exactly what he was asking for: “[T]he City seeks an order authorizing it to disregard requests from the Applicants or any of them received while an earlier request from any of the Applicants remains active or an appeal in relation to any such request is pending. With respect to existing requests, the City seeks authority to process them one at the time, beginning with the oldest outstanding request, and disregard the remaining requests until that request and any appeal related to it are concluded.” This goes far beyond what he suggested in his memo to council. He didn’t mention that I had just filed an appeal with OIPC asking them to order the City to produce a record that I had requested 16 months earlier. As well, Ross Crockford had earlier filed an appeal because the City had assessed a very high fee for records he sought on behalf of johnsonstreetbridge.org. By including the length of time an appeal could take in his proposal to Denham, if it had been accepted, first Crockford’s appeal would work its way through OIPC, and, once that had been settled—and it’s usually a five to six month wait before an appeal file is opened by OIPC—then my appeal would begin its journey, likely another five to six month wait. Then the oldest outstanding request that either Crockford or I had made would begin its journey through the City’s FOI office, followed by any appeal process, and so forth. Woodland’s proposal would have effectively killed both Crockford’s and my individual right to timely access of City records. This is an important point. As Suzanne Legault put it, “access delayed is access denied.” By not providing this information to councillors, Woodland disarmed them of their ability to make an accurate judgment about his action. The record of what happened after the City wrote to Denham makes this clear. On learning of the Section 43 application, I immediately wrote a letter to the mayor and councillors asking them to intervene. My letter, it turns out (learned via FOI), prompted an email discussion among councillors Madoff, Helps, Mayor Dean Fortin and City Manager Gail Stephens. At one point in the conversation Helps wrote to Fortin and Stephens: “I worry that if we follow through with this, Focus will make a giant national brouhaha about how closed the City of Victoria is. Is there a way to stand down and process FOI requests from Focus just as we would from anyone else?” Stephens responded to Helps: “Will send a more detailed response tomorrow. But in the short term, we are not denying Focus FOI requests, but asking that they limit those requests to one at a time...” Again, on the surface, a not unreasonable limit—and Helps’ follow-up email a couple of days later reflects this: “Has it been made clear to them that the City is not denying their FOI requests, but rather asking that these requests be made one at a time?” Helps, who from the record seems to have been the councillor most actively seeking a resolution that respected media’s right to access information, writes to Fortin and Stephens a few days later summing up the situation: “There is much public outcry, there has never been a Section 43 request filed against a media outlet in the history of the Act, and I think it does more harm to the City’s reputation than the good that will come of it. Not to mention the expense of the adjudication [hearing] process. Dean [Fortin] said to me yesterday during our monthly meeting that he thinks Mr Woodland maybe made a mistake on this one.” I recently asked councillor Helps what she thought Woodland had meant in that memo by “one request at a time.” Her response indicated she assumed “that unless there were extenuating circumstances...that the City could conform to the requirements of the Act.” That would imply requests were responded to in the 30 working days stipulated by the Act. That’s a long, long way off from what Woodland had proposed to Commissioner Denham—something that could have resulted in FOIs taking years to fulfill. By not providing councillors with full disclosure about the true impact of his action on the media’s right to participate, he took away councillors ability to meaningfully participate in democracy. Woodland did not reply to questions submitted to him by email for this article. But what about the claim of overuse in Woodland’s Section 43 application? Was it valid? He told Commissioner Denham, “The Applicants’ requests, due to their repetitious and systemic [sic] nature, have placed an unreasonable burden on the City’s limited access and privacy resources and on the operation of the JSB Project.” There are two ways to judge the validity of Woodland’s claim that Focus and Crockford were overeating at the City’s information table. First, you could look at what the City did once OIPC called a hearing to allow Woodland and Zworski to present documentary evidence of our over-indulgence. The City withdrew its Section 43 application the day before it was required to submit proof to the OIPC hearing. And a subsequent FOIseeking the written submission Zworski prepared to support Woodland’s application showed he had prepared no submission and assembled no evidence. Sheryl Masters, the City’s FOI coordinator, told Focus, “It is my understanding that no submission was prepared and that there is no draft submission nor affidavits or draft affidavits in support of any submission.” I asked Zworski by email why he hadn’t prepared a submission to support Woodland’s Section 43 application. He responded, “I am not at liberty to discuss the nature or content of legal advice that I may or may not have provided to either City council or City staff and, therefore, will not be responding to your questions.” The other basis on which to judge the validity of Woodland’s claim of overuse is the City’s record of that overuse, which I sought by FOI. Based on the record provided, either the City is not good at keeping records, or it was vastly overstating its case. In the seven months leading up to Woodland’s letter to Denham, the only time the City’s FOI office created a record showing how many bridge-project-related FOIs were active was on May 18, 2012. That record shows that with less than three months to go before Woodland wrote to Denham, Focus had two active (highlighted by Focus in yellow in that record) bridge-related requests. Ouch. Two. Crockford had made a single request on May 3, 2012 that the City then broke into five parts and said were five requests (highlighted by Focus in blue in that record). Records Crockford has shown Focus indicate he then engaged in a lengthy process of negotiation with the City over the assessed fee, and that included filing an appeal to OIPC, which I mentioned earlier. The important thing to know about Crockford’s requests is that at the time Woodland wrote Denham, the City had not been required to do any more than a preliminary assessment of what his requests involved. Woodland’s Section 43 application simply seems unsupportable. It’s one thing to assert that something is true, another altogether to prove it. The City has provided no proof. So what was the City’s Section 43 maneuver about? Both Crockford and I had been separately seeking what we were calling “the smoking gun.” This was a record that a whistle-blower inside City Hall had suggested we should try to locate. It would show City Manager Gail Stephens knew the cost of the bridge project was going to be millions of dollars over budget when she told councillors, media and the public in October 2011, just before a civic election, that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million.” Documents dated shortly after the election show the estimated cost had climbed to over $90 million. By March 2012 the cost had risen to $93 million, and that was for a bridge that had been significantly reduced in size and quality. In July 2012, I wrote Woodland and told him I was looking for records that could show whether City engineers, the City manager or the mayor knew the cost of the bridge was higher than the council-approved $77 million budget before the civic election. Shortly thereafter, both Crockford and I were Section 43ed. By doing so, Woodland took away our timely access to that record, preventing us, as Suzanne Legault might put it, from participating meaningfully in democracy. But that only lasted as long as it took Woodland and Zworski to no-show at the OIPC hearing last fall. Since then, both Crockford and I have continued to file FOIs and participate in democracy. And, just as this edition of Focus was going to press, the City finally coughed up a response to the FOI he had filed in May 2012. As expected, it contained the “smoking gun,” or, more accurately, several smoking guns. These included a memo written by acting Assistant Director of Finance Troy Restell in August 2011. His memo pointed out many costs that had already been incurred, and many other costs that were completely predictable and should have been included in the $77 million cost estimate but weren’t, that would push the project budget millons of dollars higher. Senior City managers—and the mayor—knew of Restell’s memo but kept it to themselves, thereby preventing citizens from participating meaningfully in democracy during the 2011 civic election. Watch here next month for part two of this story: The smoking gun and accountability. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

October 2012 We debunk the City's claims about why it is trying to censor Focus and we provide a more likely motivation for its unwarranted attack. LESLIE, DAVID AND GOLIATH. That’s what the City of Victoria’s application to “Section 43” our magazine feels like to us. A corporation 1000 times our size is trying to throttle us because we had the nerve to expose its mismanagement of a mega-project for which only a dubious rationale was ever produced. That project is now at the edge of failure, and Goliath is angry. That’s the metacontext of the City of Victoria’s application for a Section 43 authorization from the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) to freeze my FOI requests. Section 43 is a provision of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) that allows a public body like the City of Victoria to protect themselves from the odd crank who wants to file an FOI a day. What makes our case noteworthy is that Section 43 has never before been applied to a media source in BC. What prompted the City’s dramatic move? They claim they did it because the three people named in the application, Leslie Campbell, Ross Crockford and myself were overwhelming them with work arising from our FOI requests. I’m going to address the overwhelming- them-with-work claim in detail because that’s the fastest way to debunk what the City has been saying. Then I’ll move on to what this is really about: their dark secret. The City of Victoria made their Section 43 application on August 7, 2012. In the seven months previous to that date, Focus filed five FOI requests for which the City has provided a response. That’s five, not fifty. Our 2012 requests have declined dramatically in frequency since 2011 (a civic election year), when we filed 24. All of our requests were as focused as possible. Which makes the City’s Communications Director Katie Josephson’s characterization of our requests on CBC Radio borderline libel. Josephson told CBC, “In most cases they are asking for every email or record over the span of half a year, and you can imagine the volume of work that does go into collecting and compiling an enormous amount of records...We have seen a significant increase in the number of Freedom of Information requests from this group [Campbell, Crockford and Broadland], however it really is due to the broad nature of those requests [that the City applied for a Section 43 authorization].” Let’s look at the facts Ms Josephson has ignored. The largest of our requests was for the emails between former Project Director Mike Lai and MMM Group—the company providing the City with project management—from August 2011 to March 15, 2012. This request was filed after the predicted cost of the project had jumped from $77 million to $93 million last March. The City’s response to this request ran to 677 pages, puffed up by hundreds of pages of information that did not fit the request criteria. The City charged us $1200. I made two other requests on March 15, one for the record of internal staff communications relating to the escalating cost of the new Johnson Street Bridge (52 pages) and the other for the record of communications between the City of Victoria and the Government of Canada regarding the $16.5 million Gas Tax grant announced March 3 (19 pages). Then on March 27, I requested a ledger record of the City’s costs for the bridge replacement project between July 2011 and March 2012 (16 pages supplied in electronic format). This is a record that the City would keep as a natural course of tracking the project’s cost. On July 9, I requested evidence that the City was being overwhelmed with FOI requests, a claim they had made to OIPC in support of serial delays in producing the 677-page request. This information was supplied by the City as a single-page email. They clearly shouldn’t have been overwhelmed. One of the other people in Josephson’s “group” is Focus editor Leslie Campbell. Campbell has never made an FOI request to the City. Ross Crockford, who is a director of JohnsonStreetBridge.org, tells me that so far in 2012, the City has provided him with a response to only one request for information (191 electronic pages). He abandoned one other request after the City assessed what he felt was an unreasonably high fee. Josephson’s “enormous amount of records” actually amounted to 956 pages over a period of 7 months. Is this “enormous”? No. A single FOI request by a journalist can often run to thousands of pages of records. Focus’ Rob Wipond tells me a recent request he made to Public Works and Government Services Canada will run to 5200 pages; another with Health Canada, 3200 pages. Speaking about the City’s Section 43 application at the September 28 Sunshine Summit in Victoria, former Information and Privacy Commissioner Dr David Flaherty called the City’s Section 43 request “absolutely outrageous,” adding, “If you’re planning to spend $100 million on something, you better fund the FOI regime to be able to handle the access requests, otherwise it’s undemocratic and inappropriate.” He expressed a hope that the City would be “whacked” by OIPC. It isn’t too surprising that the same senior City managers who forgot to include the $1.1 million cost of applying for permits, for example, would also overlook the need to increase funding for its FOI capacity by a few thousand dollars. Meanwhile, the City happily spends $600,000 a year on Josephson’s image makeover department. But the source of the City’s Section 43 attack on this magazine isn’t just the short supply of competency at City Hall. Its action demonstrates a willingness to use FIPPA’s provisions for cynical political purposes. According to FOI experts assisting Focus, City of Victoria has next to no chance of winning the authorization it is seeking. That’s not even the City’s game. Lawyer Michael Vonn, policy director for the BC Civil Liberties Association, in discussion about the City’s Section 43 maneuver, compared it to a shell game and said, “Like comedy, the only thing that counts in FOI is timing. If you can stall it out past the line, it almost doesn’t matter.” The City is simply misusing a provision of FIPPA to stall the release of information. It’s hoping to play the clock out and get a contract signed on a new bridge before its Section 43 request is declined by OIPC and it is ordered to release information that could embarrass it and threaten its already shaky project. I believe the foundation for the City’s stalling tactic was laid on July 5, 2012 when I sent an email to the City outlining the public interest involved in my 677-page request mentioned above. Public bodies are required by FIPPA to provide information at no cost when the information is deemed to be in the public interest. So I made my pitch. My premise was simple. In the 52-page FOI mentioned above, I had obtained a memo written by the City’s Assistant Director of Finance Susanne Thompson. That memo and other documents showed senior City managers definitely knew about significant design changes and the bulk of the $16 million price increase for the bridge project on November 21, 2011, just a few days after the last civic election. It seemed very likely, then, that the cost increase was known by City Manager Gail Stephens and former Project Director Mike Lai before the election. But how much before? This question matters. In my appeal for a fee waiver, I wrote, “If the engineers knew of the design change and anticipated cost increases and did not relate this information to the city manager or councillors, this raises the question of whether they have breached their professional code of ethics. If the city manager knew of anticipated cost increases but did not relate this information to the mayor or councillors, this raises the question of whether the city manager acted ethically by informing them that the project was ‘on budget, on schedule.’ Whether civic officials have acted ethically is always a matter of public interest.” I was referring to an October 6, 2011 council meeting at which City Manager Gail Stephens had reassured councillors the project was “on budget and within timelines.” The City’s Director of Legislative Services Robert Woodland rejected my request for a fee waiver on July 19. He made it clear that he was aware of my “theory,” as he put it, but differed on whether such a concern was a matter of public interest. What’s important to note is that the City was aware of why I was asking for the information. Now I need to go back in time for a moment to pick up a stray piece of the story. A document obtained from the above-mentioned 52-page FOI request had noted that on September 12, 2011, the “JSB Steering Committee” had met and discussed the “wheel design.” Don’t laugh. This is much more unusual than it sounds. In the 677-page response mentioned above, the subject of the bridge’s design never appeared; nor was there any mention of cost escalation. It was clear these issues, and any other problems they were having, were being discussed in some other venue than the email communication between Lai and MMM Group. The Steering Committee consisted of all the top officials working on the project, including Stephens, Lai, and Joost Meyboom of MMM Group. Whenever the design changes and cost increase had occurred, these would have been the first people to know. We know from the above document that Sherri Andrews, Stephen’s personal assistant, attended all or some of these meetings and made notes. We know from a City Hall insider that Andrews takes shorthand notes of transcript quality. So on August 3, working along that same line of inquiry, I requested from the City “the personal notes and records made by City of Victoria employee Sherri Andrews that covered the proceedings of the JSB Steering Committee between January 1, 2011 and August 3, 2012.” My August 3 FOI touched a sensitive nerve at City Hall. By August 7 the City had applied to OIPC for authorization to ignore FOI requests from me, Leslie Campbell and Ross Crockford, both of whom were apparently guilty by association. Merely by applying for the authorization, any FOI requests I had made were automatically frozen, including the August 3 request. Is the dark secret that the cost increase was known in September 2011? Or is it that and a whole lot of other embarrassing facts about how badly this project has been managed? A “Final Project Definition Report,” which was wrestled from the clutches of senior managers and into public view after I informed councillors of its existence back in early September, contains sobering revelations. For example, the report notes that as of July 31, the design for the bridge was only at “30 percent.” MMM Group told councillors in March the design would be at 60 percent before the procurement process started. Here’s the bottom line. The date for receiving bids for construction of a new bridge was to be completed by August 17. After two postponements, that date has been moved to October 18. The “design optimization” process, by which the three construction companies rework the design so they can keep within an overall project cost of $93 million, may produce a bridge very different from the one Victorians approved in the 2010 referendum. When councillors finally get to see what that looks like, they’ll have to decide whether to proceed or kill the project and look at other options. With the project hanging by a political thread, any bad news could sink it. So City managers chose to knock the most likely source of embarrassing news out of the game for as long as possible. City managers could easily prove me wrong by releasing the requested information without further delay. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

September 2012 An engineering report obtained through an FOI estimates $34 million is needed to bring 16 City-owned buildings up to seismic code. THE CONTENTS OF AN ENGINEERING CONSULTANT’S seismic risk assessment of City-owned buildings obtained by Focus through provisions of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act suggest the City of Victoria has been misrepresenting the financial liabilities it faces by at least $34 million. And the study’s findings lead inevitably to the question of whether senior City managers have been making rational decisions about how to manage the risk associated with potential loss of life during a seismic event. According to the City’s Director of Corporate Communications Katie Josephson, the work entailed in the $40,000 study “was completed during the last half of 2009 and through 2010,” and a final version delivered to the City by engineering consultants Read Jones Christoffersen in December, 2010—three weeks after the referendum on the Johnson Street Bridge. The report, which looked at 16 City-owned structures, estimated the extent to which they met current seismic code requirements, provided an estimated cost for seismic retrofit and created a ranking system for determining which projects were most urgent. The report included the City-owned Victoria Conference Centre and its parkade, the grandstand and administration structure at Royal Athletic Park, various public works buildings on Garbally Road, administration buildings and community centres. According to the City, the aggregate peak occupancy of the 16 buildings is 3425 people. Read Jones Christoffersen considered life safety, cost, and “level of importance” in ranking the buildings. The “Royal Athletic Park Administration and Entrance Pavilion,” with a potential peak occupancy of 1000 people, ranked first (highest priority) in two out of three rankings. The report noted the structure “is estimated at roughly 20 percent of current code,” and ball-parked the cost of a seismic retrofit at $1 million. Also high in the rankings is Fairfield Gonzales Community Centre, which has a peak occupancy of 150 people, is “in the order of 20 percent” of code requirements, and has an estimated cost to retrofit of $375,000. Read Jones Christoffersen estimated the Victoria Conference Centre and its parkade were both at approximately 62 percent of current code requirements. In spite of having a peak occupancy of 1500 people, the estimated cost for a seismic retrofit—$20 million—pushed that facility to the bottom, or close to the bottom, in each of the three ranking systems. Four of the public works buildings in the study were estimated to be at only 10 percent of code requirements for seismic resistance. With a total peak occupancy of 30 people, the report estimated their retrofit would cost $2.5 million in total. In March 2011, Focus filed an FOI request for all seismic risk assessments the City had completed. The City’s legislative services department made serial attempts to deny access to three documents, and only provided the Read Jones Christoffersen report when a formal complaint was filed with the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner in August. The City administration’s suppression of the report begs the question: Why hasn’t the information been made public? Senior City managers have known for 20 months that these 16 buildings will add at least $34 million to stated unfunded capital costs. (Having a déjà vu moment? The City also held back a seismic assessment of Firehall No. 1 for 18 months before going public last October.) Questions emailed to City Manager Gail Stephens and General Manager of Operations Peter Sparanese went unanswered by our press deadline. The City’s Josephson downplayed the report’s findings. “As you’ll see on page one of the introduction,” Josephson pointed out, “the evaluation prepared by Read Jones Christoffersen ‘was the initial stage in a process to identify which buildings should be considered a priority for possible seismic upgrades.’ It was further outlined in the same paragraph that a more detailed analysis and accurate budgets would need to be prepared. This study was commissioned as a preliminary review of civic buildings to assist City engineers in developing policy on prioritization and the development of a long-term capital plan is underway. When more detailed analysis and accurate budgets are established, the capital plan will be updated and considered by council.” But don’t all exploratory engineering reports allude to the need for further study and refinement of costs? And does that mean they should be kept secret from council and the public? When Delcan’s Dr Joost Meyboom made his first recommendation about the seismic vulnerability of the Johnson Street Bridge, he told City staff the bridge should be repaired and seismically retrofitted. He offered a first estimate of cost ($8.6 million) and said, “I would suggest that our current study be extended to refine the retrofit concept and the associated costs.” In that case, too, senior City managers kept the “initial stage in the process” hidden from councillors and the public. Meyboom’s recommendation wasn’t made public until it was rooted out by FOI. By then the price had risen dramatically. City managers are now hoping a new bridge won’t cost more than $93 million, over ten times Meyboom’s first estimate. Given that outcome, is there any good reason City staff should be left to work out of public sight? Victoria City Councillor Geoff Young doesn’t seem to think so. He confirmed the Read Jones Christoffersen report hadn’t been seen by councillors. Was he concerned the report had been withheld for 20 months? “I am very conscious that since the report was produced,” Young said, “council has spent much time considering priorities, budgets, and capital needs. In those discussions it would have been very valuable to have had the information in this report in front of us.” Young added, “I am very concerned that the whole range of seismic problems and the price list [in the report] have not been presented to council. I have already expressed my view that had the condition of the firehall been known at the time we were still discussing our approach to the bridge, the council might have considered the [less expensive rehabilitation] options seriously, instead of insisting on the rehabilitation meeting 100 percent of current standards for post-disaster bridges.” The safety implications of the Read Jones Christoffersen report perturb Young: “I know that all of us on council were very aware of the need for public safety; knowing that many of our employees work in buildings that are only at 20 percent of current codes might have changed some of my colleagues’ views as to the best use of funds—and probably more people among our staff work in buildings that are only at 10 percent of current seismic than would normally be on the bridge at any given time. Again, the need to make one bridge perfectly safe pales against the need to increase the safety of public buildings in which perhaps hundreds of our citizens may be gathered.” With the rising cost for a new bridge strangling the City’s ability to address the needs raised in the Read Jones Christoffersen report, Young thinks a change in course is needed. “Saving perhaps 10 or 20 or 30 million dollars by making do with a refurbished bridge built to slightly lower standards (preserving life but not usable after the disaster) makes a lot more sense when, with that same money, we could save the building value, and perhaps lives, within many of our buildings. I say ‘perhaps lives’ because the report does not translate the seismic code percentages into loss of life [or] loss of building value, and I do not have the technical expertise to make that translation. Based on my small knowledge of the Christchurch experience I suspect that a building meeting only 10 percent of code is very bad for the occupants in a major quake, but cannot be sure. Adding this component to the analysis would be one of the first things we should ask for in ordering our priorities.” The Delcan report estimated that peak occupancy of the Johnson Street Bridge was likely to be 35 people. It’s sobering to consider that number now in light of the 3425 people that could be at risk in the 16 public buildings covered by the Read Jones Christoffersen report. The Delcan report noted that even in a “major seismic event” there would likely be no loss of life on the existing bridge, as is. For a “severe seismic event,” they predicted a 20 percent fatality rate and a loss of seven lives. Yet the same senior City managers who have known the life-safety basics of the Read Jones Christoffersen report since late 2009 recommended to councillors they spend $93 million to replace the bridge. Release of the Read Jones Christoffersen report comes at a critical moment. The City, for reasons unexplained, extended by three weeks the date by which the three companies in the running for the contract to build a replacement bridge were required to submit bids. This suggests more than one of the companies are having trouble meeting the City’s expectations on cost and/or design. If the bids come in above the City’s “affordability ceiling” of $93 million for the entire project, councillors—with the Read Jones Christoffersen report on the table—will have a hard time justifying an even costlier bridge. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus.

May 2012 The City low-balled the price tag and is concealing that fact. With so much being hidden and costs likely to top $100 million, is it time for a change of course? THE WHIFF OF SCANDAL around the Johnson Street Bridge project grows stronger. One wonders what it will take for one of the die-hard City of Victoria councillors—the ones who have clung steadfastly to what appears to be a sinking ship—to jump before they’re sucked down with the wreckage. Former councillor Philippe Lucas, a stalwart supporter of the project throughout his three-year term, has jumped. When Lucas learned the new bridge had lost its one unique feature—a walkway that would allow pedestrians passage through the 50-foot wheels while the bridge was being raised or lowered, his response was unequivocal. “That truly sucks!” he wrote on Facebook. “Whatever my feeling may have been at the start of this project, when we lost the rail portion of the bridge due to reluctance from the last council to back multiple motions I put forward to save this key economic link to the rest of the island, I began to realize what an unmitigated disaster this new bridge was going to be. Losing the ability to walk through the bridge is simply the final blow to what could have been an iconic link to a more sustainable future for Victoria, but has now become a short span to budget increases and unacceptable design changes, and an iconic local monument to the short-term thinking that plagues modern politics. What a debacle; what a disappointment.” Perplexing questions about the “debacle” continue to float to the surface: Did Mayor Dean Fortin and City Manager Gail Stephens hide a massive redesign and its cost implications before last year’s civic election? Have the costs of that redesign, still unacknowledged by any of the bridge’s promoters, even been included in the latest $93 million estimate? Was the second-to-last cost estimate purposely low-balled? What else has been concealed? Does the City even have a Plan B? What the mayor won’t talk about On April 3, Mayor Fortin wrote a letter to the Times Colonist stating the design change to the walkway had been discussed at a February 7 council meeting. The mayor was making the point that the change had not been hidden from councillors. The next day, Ross Crockford, a director of watchdog JohnsonStreetBridge.org, wrote to Fortin disputing this claim and asking him to make a public correction. Crockford had recorded the meeting and a transcript showed the design change had not been discussed on February 7. Then, during a question period at an April 12 council meeting, Crockford asked Fortin if he intended to correct his statement that the design change had been discussed on February 7. Fortin replied, “I choose not to answer any of your questions, Mr Crockford. You are free to file an FOI request, if you want.” “Wait—any questions?” Crockford asked. “Any questions,” Fortin replied. Why is the question of whether or not the walkway change was discussed with councillors such a sensitive issue for the mayor? It’s partly about the walkway. The City had boasted before the referendum in 2010, “The new bridge will be a world-class landmark. Designed by renowned bridge architects Wilkinson Eyre, the replacement design is one of a kind and will allow you to walk through the rolling mechanism while the bridge raises.” That’s no longer true. Shouldn’t councillors have been consulted? But there’s more at stake. The burning questions are: Was this change intentionally concealed from councillors and the public? If so, why? And by whom? On March 15, when a slim majority of City councillors decided to approve spending $93 million on a new bridge, there had been plenty of opportunities for full disclosure. Joost Meyboom of MMM Group, the City’s prime consultant on the project, the bridge’s architect Sebastien Ricard of Wilkinson Eyre Architects, and the City’s project director Mike Lai all had the perfect opportunity to acknowledge the design changes the bridge had undergone and the effect those would have on its functionality and cost. Instead, there was an attempt to hide the design changes. The renderings presented were years old—from the era when it was going to be built in 17 months. Slides of complex construction drawings in which the changes appeared were given little or no explanation and were shown only briefly. There was no mention of the change in status of the walkway “through the rolling mechanism while the bridge raises.” Why were these changes hidden? And now the plot thickens. While the mayor says councillors were informed on February 7, Focus has learned the design changes were made in July 2011. Architectural drawings produced by Wilkinson Eyre’s office in London on July 27, 2011 show the footprint of the main pier had doubled in size compared with drawings circulated a month before, and the “walk through the rolling mechanism while the bridge raises” had been cut from the plan. The project’s inner circle must have known at that time the bridge’s cost was going to rise dramatically. More on this later. Since these substantial changes to the bridge’s functionality and cost occurred last July, is it possible City Manager Stephens was unaware of the changes and their cost implications when she said last October that the project “continues to be within the budget of $77 million”? Is it possible that project director Lai neglected to tell her? Stephens is the chair of the project’s steering committee, and as such she would have been at the centre of any exchange of information. She did not respond to a request for information from Focus. Did Mayor Fortin know about these changes and the cost implications before November’s civic elections? Is it possible the City manager didn’t inform the mayor? Fortin, too, failed to respond to a request for information. Did Stephens and Fortin withhold the information because it might have changed the outcome of the election? A risk management workshop held by the City in January 2011 had identified a “change of council members” as a definite risk to the successful completion of the project. The suggested mitigation strategy for this risk was “internal communication,” which, I believe, is code for “circle the wagons.” Had voters known before the election that the cost of the project had climbed by $16 million, would other pro-replacement councillors have lost their seats? In that election, three pro-replacement councillors, including Lucas, lost their place at the council table. The project now hangs by a political thread; the council is split 5 to 4. One Lucas-like defection from the mayor’s team and a Plan B will need to materialize. That this design change took place eight months before Fortin says councillors were alerted has more serious implications than what-if ruminations on last November’s election. It’s now clear that Meyboom, Lai, Stephens and Fortin have been sitting on information that, had it been disclosed eight months ago, might very well have provided both the impetus and the time to develop a Plan B. And the question arises: If they would conceal this, what else has been hidden? Is the real cost still being hidden? Last October, Stephens said the project would cost $77 million. Five months later it was $93 million. The City’s accounting of this price increase is confused. For example, consider construction costs. In one document, the City says the increase in construction costs is $9.7 million. But in another document, released the same week, they say it’s $7.6 million. In both cases, overall costs total “$92.8 million.” How can both be true? Was one of these numbers—or both—pulled from a hat? A few weeks before the revelation that costs had climbed by $15.8 million, Fortin announced $16.5 million in Gas Tax funding had been approved by the federal and provincial governments. Was the $15.8 million cost increase simply calibrated to match the increase in available funding? There’s reason to believe that’s exactly what the City has done. A planning document for the bridge attached to an email dated July 6, 2011 (obtained through an FOI request) shows the main pier having a footprint of roughly 2000 square feet. But an architectural drawing released recently by the City shows that pier has almost doubled in size. The pier, or more properly, the pier building, is not simply a big, solid block of reinforced concrete, as with the existing bridge. It’s a six-storey-high reinforced concrete structure that would need to be built to exceedingly high construction standards. This would be a much more complex and expensive project than, say, an ordinary 6-storey residential or commercial building. For one thing, the pier building would have to support 2700 metric tonnes of steel perched on its “roof,” and it would need to do this without being damaged by the ground waves of a magnitude 8.5 earthquake. And, since the bottom half of the pier building would be submerged, the structure would have to be built to remain perfectly watertight for the next 100 years. Inside, the pier building would be a vast complex of gear beds, stairways, electrical equipment and a yawning open space through which the 840-tonne counterweight fixed to the underside of the bridge deck would swing when the bridge is raised or lowered. The pier building would sit on several rows of three-foot-diameter steel pipes filled with steel-reinforced concrete, the pipes socketed deep into bedrock. Because this complex building would have to be built inside waterproof coffer dams, its construction would be complicated, painstakingly slow and expensive. Previous to the redesign, the cost of the pier building had been estimated at about $10 million. Assuming that cost was not underestimated, doubling the size of this very expensive building would reasonably be expected to double the cost to $20 million. In spite of these obvious upward pressures on price, Meyboom’s latest estimate has the cost of the bridge’s two piers dropping by $1.6 million. Is that believable? The redesign also changed the geometry of the bridge’s moving parts (one of which is over 200 feet long) in such a way that their fabrication would require what bridge engineer Frank Nelson has called “aerospace tolerances.” Nelson says that would introduce the possibility that bids to build the bridge would include “risk pricing,” potentially blowing whatever budget the promoters were hoping for. All this suggests that the magnitude of the recent cost increase was simply a reflection of the Gas Tax funding getting official approval from Ottawa, not some careful new determination of costs based on a refinement of the design, as suggested by Meyboom. And a close examination of the recently-acknowledged costs doesn’t instill much confidence either. Was the $77-million estimate faked? In explaining to councillors why the cost of the new bridge had risen from $77 million to $93 million, Joost Meyboom identified “project management and engineering” as one of the two main culprits. That cost rose from $7.4 million to $13.6 million. Why did the amount engineering companies like Meyboom’s will receive almost double? Meyboom has admitted he underestimated a number of predictable costs, such as the cost of obtaining approvals and permits, but has given no details as to how or why that happened. It is difficult to explain. In the June 2010 estimate of $77 million, which was peer-reviewed by Stantec Consulting, “approvals and permits” are missing altogether. The peer reviewer, Stantec’s Andrew Rushforth, failed to notice this even though, at the time the estimate was done, the cost of approvals and permits for the project had already reached $320,000. And who had received that $320,000? Rushforth’s Stantec Consulting. To add insult to injury, Stantec received close to $50,000 for its “peer review.” Of the six categories of work that Meyboom says contributed to the $6.2 million increase in project management and engineering, none had been included in the $77 million estimate. What possible motive could there have been to forget whole categories of costs back in 2010? It’s well known that the City strongly favoured building a new bridge; the record is crystal clear on that. But part of the community had expressed a preference to rehabilitate the existing bridge. Perhaps the strongest part of their argument was that rehabilitation would be less expensive than building a signature bridge with an unproven mechanical design. Indeed, in an unpublished survey (obtained through FOI) conducted by Ipsos for the City in April 2010, before the $77 million cost estimate was finalized, the expense of a new bridge was identified as the most important concern Victoria residents had about the replacement option. So the City knew in advance it needed to prove a new bridge would be less expensive than a rehabilitated bridge. The bridge promoters were motivated to underestimate the price of a new bridge. The costs they suppressed are now coming to the surface. Underestimating costs is just one of the tricks the promoters used to move their project forward. They have been just as effective at using the threat of not meeting timelines to shape the project to meet their desired ends. Phony deadlines, too? Philippe Lucas is not alone in his disappointment over the loss of rail from the project, which he attributes to his fellow councillors not backing his motions. Although Lucas believed councillors were making the big decisions, they were actually just rubber-stamping City staff recommendations. Those recommendations, when they involved major turning points in the project, have been in lockstep with Meyboom’s advice. And the paper trail shows it was an arguable piece of advice from Meyboom about the extra time it would take if rail were included in the project that led to the recommendation to take rail off the bridge. Let’s go back to February 2011. City council had approved spending up to $700,000 on a parallel design process that would have allowed rail on the bridge should additional funding come through in time. On February 4, an email exchange (obtained through FOI) between Meyboom and Lai took place. Lai, referring to a new schedule Meyboom had produced, asked Meyboom, “Why has the timeline changed for the rail-in option from end 2014/early 2015 to a year later?” Meyboom told Lai that including rail on the bridge would add five months to its construction. As well, he said, “After completion of the bridge an additional seven months is estimated to install track, the new rail station and the parking lot for the rail station.” Meyboom’s rail-in schedule would have pushed completion very close to the March 2016 deadline the City had said it needed to meet to receive the full $21 million in Build Canada funding. Lai took that information back to councillors and told them that although nearly half of the funding needed for rail could be available from the CRD, it might take “four to six months” to have it approved. So Lai recommended rail be dropped from the project, partly on the basis that, he wrote, “If timelines are not met, there is a risk of losing the $21 million in federal funding.” Terrified of losing that money, councillors approved Lai’s recommendation and the City ended their search for additional funding. And that was the end of rail. But there are two logical disconnects in Meyboom’s advice and Lai’s recommendation. First, Meyboom and Lai are the same crew that insisted in 2009 the entire project, including rail and a longer bascule leaf, could be completed in 17 months. That plan was only halted when the provincial government refused to contribute funding. But at the time that Lai was making his recommendation to council about rail in March 2011, they had 60 months to build the bridge. If the bridge with rail on it could be built in 17 months, why not in 60 months? Second, why would “laying track” and building a new train station and parking lot need to be left until the bridge was completed? Why not do this work concurrently with building the bridge? Was concern about missing the funding deadline used to get rail off the bridge because there was some other motivation in play? Perhaps things weren’t exactly as they seemed to Lucas and his fellow councillors. At exactly the same time as council was voting to take rail off the bridge, Pacific Liaicon and Associates were putting the finishing touches on a report for BC Transit that would go on to recommend building a $950 million LRT using the Douglas Street corridor from Downtown to Uptown, and then west to Langford. An option competing with the LRT option is commuter rail from Downtown to Langford using the existing E&N rail bed via the Johnson Street Bridge. The cost of that project has been ball-parked by the BC Ministry of Transportation at between $69.5 million and $166 million. If a new bridge had included rail, momentum would have developed to utilize that capacity; commuter rail’s stock would rise. With no rail on the bridge, it would fall. And LRT’s stock would rise. Pacific Liaicon is a division of SNC Lavalin, the Quebec-based engineering and construction giant that specializes in building LRT systems. Kevin Mahoney, the chair of BC Transit’s board of directors, is also on the board of Intransit BC, the company that owns and operates Vancouver’s Canada Line. Intransit is owned one-third by SNC Lavalin. SNC Lavalin seems to have at least a couple of important ducks lined up that could give it the inside track on an LRT project in Victoria. But are those the only ducks? Meyboom’s company, MMM Group, is currently partnering with SNC Lavalin in two separate bids for LRT projects: the Evergreen Line in Vancouver and the Ottawa LRT Project. And SNC Lavalin and MMM Group are partners in building the $800 million Calgary West LRT. Meyboom himself is playing a prominent role in that project. According to MMM, his responsibilities in Calgary include “management of the [LRT] structural design team, resolution of project specific technical issues, and management of a very constrained design schedule.” Putting all this together, it appears Meyboom gave advice about timing that helped take rail off the new bridge. That increased the chances that LRT would be built in Victoria. And, if MMM partners with SNC Lavalin in building an LRT project in Victoria, like they have in Calgary, MMM would obviously benefit. I asked Meyboom if he had divulged to the City of Victoria his company’s working relationship with SNC Lavalin and the apparent conflict of interest that put him in regarding his advice about rail on the new bridge. Meyboom did not respond. The threat of “not meeting timelines” and losing funding, which was used so effectively to get rail off the bridge, is now being used by the City to dismiss calls for a time out on the project so other options can be considered. But would the City really lose all—or any—of the funding? Does the City need a Plan B? The latest project schedule from the City calls for a contract to be signed with a builder this fall. They say they have prequalified eight companies. Councillors hope that at least one of those will find a way to build the Wilkinson Eyre design for $93 million. According to councillor Lisa Helps “there’s little appetite” around the table for spending more than $93 million. But if costs have been significantly underestimated, what will happen? I posed that question to Ross Crockford, whose watchdog organization johnsonstreetbridge.org has been monitoring the project closely. “The big risk for council,” Crockford said, “is that they’ll have no option but to keep going with the current bridge, regardless of the cost. City staff have already said, repeatedly, that any delay ‘jeopardizes’ federal funding. So if contractors tell the City this summer that they can only build the bridge for $100 million or more, council will be under pressure to approve the increase.” Crockford thinks councillors need to act now to ensure there’s a Plan B. “Council will have to spend a little money to create a backup plan. But, without one, the risk is great that there will be ever-increasing costs for the bridge itself.” Mayor Fortin has rejected any consideration of a Plan B on the grounds that would somehow put at risk $37.5 million in funding, an echo of Lai’s oft-used “If timelines are not met...” threat. But even if time is tight—which is in some doubt—what would happen if construction went past March, 2016, the deadline for the $21 million Build Canada funding? “First of all,” Crockford says, “the federal contribution agreement says the City can ask for a deadline extension. The request goes to a four-person committee—and two of them are City appointees. So the request would likely succeed.” But what happens if the City isn’t given an extension? Crockford says the City needs someone besides the project engineers to advise them. “It’s not clear what happens if the City doesn’t get an extension, and is a year or two late. The agreement does say that if the City ‘has not completed the Project on the terms and conditions herein,’ the feds could demand all their money back. But they could also just turn off the financial taps, which would be OK, because the City plans to spend nearly all the federal money by 2015 anyway. Council needs advice about this from its lawyers, not its engineers.” The project will also receive $16.5 million from the Gas Tax Fund. Would that be at risk if council chooses to go to a Plan B? Not likely. According to Paul Taylor, a spokesperson for the UBCM, which administers Gas Tax Fund grants in BC, “A completion date is included in each funding agreement based on the recipient’s estimate of the time necessary to complete the project. This date, though, can be amended to provide additional time if there are delays in construction.” The City also says that pushing on with Plan A is the only way to ensure “$10 million in sunk costs” won’t be wasted. Crockford disagrees. “A lot of the money that’s already spent has been for acquiring land, geotechnical analysis, permits, moving the Telus duct, and removing the rail span, all of which would happen no matter what bridge gets built. The main thing we’d lose is the architects’ work, which City staff have pegged at $2 million. It may be worth eating that to get a standard design with a proven record of durability. There don’t seem to be any current examples of bridges with the new open-wheels-on-rollers mechanism they created. So it’s impossible to predict how much it will cost, how well it will work, or how long it will last.” Crockford thinks there’s just too many unanswered questions about the project for comfort and, along with several councillors, is calling for an “independent audit” of the project: “City staff have repeatedly withheld key information, and council can’t rely on them to provide all the options. An independent audit is the only way council will really find out if the City can build a simpler, cheaper bridge, and still get all the federal funding.” ON MARCH 14, Stantec’s Andrew Rushforth wrote a letter to the City’s Director of Engineering and Public Works Dwayne Kalynchuk. The letter was handed over to City councillors without explanation a few days later and a copy made it's way into my hands. Rushforth’s letter began, “As per your request, this letter outlines the issues relating to possible rehabilitation of the Johnson Street Highway Bascule Bridge.” Yes, that’s correct: r-e-h-a-b-i-l-i-t-a-t-i-o-n. Rushforth went on to reiterate what was already known: The existing bridge can be rehabilitated. Is this the City's Plan B? They could do worse. According to bridge engineer Frank Nelson, the new bridge “will likely exceed $100 million by the time it goes to construction. Rehabilitation, even including the engineering costs to date...would be half that and would keep the look and the feel of the harbour that draws many visitors.” Unfortunately, Nelson’s “half that” estimate was made before the railway bridge was destroyed. Debacle indeed. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus

March 2012 The long-term environmental consequences of a mistake made by Victoria City Hall are uncertain. WHAT’S THE PURPOSE of federal environmental regulations as they pertain to construction projects like the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline? Are they intended to protect the environment from negative impacts caused by construction? Or are they intended to protect construction projects from the negative impacts caused by public concern and scrutiny? These questions floated to the top of my mind recently after I posed a series of questions to Transport Canada about the Telus duct relocation project in Victoria Harbour. It appeared that a key stipulation of a Canadian Environmental Assessment Act (CEAA) environmental assessment had been ignored or misunderstood by the City of Victoria, and the regulatory body that was supposed to be protecting the environment and enforcing the law was instead defending the City. Let me give you some context to set this up. My conversation with Transport Canada will follow. Work recently done by Ruskin Construction under a contract with the City of Victoria involved dredging a large trench across an area of Victoria Harbour that has been registered with the federal Contaminated Sites Inventory. The trench was dug in order to relocate communication cables belonging to Telus. The relocation project had been subject to a CEAA Environmental Assessment Screening Report carried out by Transport Canada. Studies have shown the area that was trenched is badly contaminated, with at least 19 environmental toxins present (see below), each at concentrations that would qualify the site as a “Contaminated Site” under the BC Contaminated Sites Regulation Guidelines. The consequences of stirring up those contaminants was laid out in a report prepared by Stantec Consulting for the City of Victoria. Stantec noted, “Both sediments and contaminants have the potential to affect marine biota. Increased turbidity may interfere with fish respiration, feeding activity and result in direct smothering of marine organisms. Resuspended contaminants may be ingested and result in bioaccumulation within the food chain, decreased invertebrate diversity, abundance and growth and physiological and behavioural alterations.” The City of Victoria was given permission last September by Transport Canada to go ahead with dredging the trench through the contaminated site. Transport Canada’s environmental assessment of the project accepted recommendations made on behalf of the City by Stantec that the work could be done without significant harm to the environment if certain precautions were taken. But in addition to the mitigation strategy put forward by Stantec, Transport Canada stipulated “that the proponent installs a sediment curtain around the area to be trenched to ensure suspended sediments are contained within the immediate project area.” (Emphasis added.) On reading Transport Canada’s assessment, any reasonable person would, I think, come to the conclusion that a legitimate process to protect the environment was at work. After all, Transport Canada was demanding that a significant action, above and beyond what the City was offering, would have to be included. As it turned out though, Ruskin Construction dredged the trench through the contaminated site without deploying the required sediment curtains. Headquartered in Prince George, the company had the lowest of five bids the City received from companies pre-qualified to bid on the Telus relocation project. When asked why sediment curtains were not used, a spokesperson for the City of Victoria, Katie Josephson, said an “environmental monitor” had been on the site and any decision not to use a sediment curtain would have been made “under their guidance.” Josephson told Focus the environmental monitor’s work was done “in consultation with Transport Canada and according to their regulations.” Josephson first identified the “environmental monitor” as an employee of MMM Group, the City’s prime consultant on the relocation project, but two weeks later clarified that Ruskin, the company that did the dredging, had done the environmental monitoring. Adding two of Josephson’s pieces of information together, we arrive at the startling conclusion that the company doing the dredging also made the decision not to use sediment curtains. (Ruskin Construction did not respond to a request for information) Josephson also said, “A silt fence or sediment curtain is required for work on land as the issue is to prevent runoff with contaminants from entering the harbour... No sediment curtain is required in-water—only mitigation measures.” (Emphasis added.) But a spokesperson for Transport Canada, Sau Sau Liu, contradicted the City’s claims about what they were expected to do and what consultation had taken place. “Transport Canada,” Liu said, “did not advise the City of Victoria, or any other entity, to not use the sediment curtains.” Transport Canada was also at odds with the City’s interpretation of what “sediment curtains” and “mitigation” meant. As Liu explained, “A sediment curtain is a fine-mesh fabric suspended from floats and weighted at the bottom to control silt and sediment from entering or spreading in the water, and allows suspended particles to settle in a confined area of water.” Liu also said, “The mitigation required was the use of a sediment curtain around the area to minimize the spread of suspended sediments.” Liu clarified that “the immediate project area” stipulated in the environmental assessment “refers to the area adjacent to where the work was done.” In other words, the dredging across the contaminated site should have involved sediment curtains strung from one side of the channel to the other, on either side of the dredged trench. A City employee had, by mistake or neglect, misinterpreted the intended mitigation. Now this sounds like a clear-cut case of the City failing to abide by the terms of a CEAA environmental assessment. Fulfilling the stipulations of that assessment was part and parcel of a federal contribution agreement to provide up to $21 million to fund the new Johnson Street Bridge project. The funding agreement said failure to abide by the terms of the environmental assessment could lead to “default.” But the studies and the terms of the funding agreement, so far as they purport to protect the environment, appear to be a farce. I suggested to Transport Canada’s Liu that since her agency had stipulated use of a sediment curtain to prevent environmental damage, it followed that, since curtains were not used, environmental damage would occur. Liu responded, “No. Transport Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans required the proponent to have an environmental management plan and an approved environmental monitor on site responsible to the environmental management plan. The environmental management plan and use of an environmental monitor mitigate environmental damage.” Just how deployment in the field of the “environmental management plan,” or even the “environmental monitor” could physically replace the missing sediment curtains in preventing the spread of contaminant-laden sediments was unclear. Would Transport Canada follow up to determine whether any environmental damage was done? Liu said, “Transport Canada has received environmental monitoring reports for all works conducted to date on this project. We are satisfied with the work to date.” Although the City claimed Ruskin was the environmental monitor, Liu said the “environmental monitoring reports” were provided by the City of Victoria. And when we asked Liu what specific actions had been taken by Transport Canada that allowed them to conclude “there has been no environmental impact,” she said, “Transport Canada reviewed the environmental monitoring reports provided by the City of Victoria...” But can simply reading a report prove anything? It gets worse. Scrutiny of Transport Canada’s CEAA Environmental Assessment Screening Report for the Telus Duct Project shows that much of the report is simply a word-for-word copying of paragraphs from a report written for the City by Stantec Consulting. Transport Canada provides attribution for some of this copying, but some copied passages are given no attribution. It boils down to this: the Environmental Assessment is largely written by the proponent. Is that how it works for Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, too? It’s not surprising that the City of Victoria bungled the very first shovels-in-the-ground operation in building the new Johnson Street Bridge. The project so far has been a long series of miscalculations dressed up as progress. But it’s harder to understand why Transport Canada would, at considerable taxpayer expense, first produce an environmental assessment that insisted on an action they said would mitigate environmental damage, then willfully look the other way once they learned their instruction had been ignored. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

November 2010 The numbers the City presented for the cost of a new bridge and the cost to rehabilitate the current bridge were based on estimates done by Advicas Group. Those estimates were peer-reviewed by Stantec's Andrew Rushforth, but analysis suggests the numbers have been tweaked so the City’s high-end rehabilitation appears to be more expensive. We un-tweak the numbers. VICTORIA CITY HALL SAYS IT WILL COST $77 million for a new bridge without rail on it and $80 million for what is now known as the “gold-plated” rehab. I’ve been asking myself 3 question about these two numbers: • Where did they come from? • Can they be trusted? • Do they represent the only options the City could have considered when deciding what to put to a referendum. I think these are important questions and I’m going to try to provide answers. The “peer-reviewed” Advicas cost estimates First of all, the City’s numbers derive from the Class ‘C’ estimates done by Advicas Group Consultants in June of this year. The Advicas estimates were peer reviewed by Andrew Rushforth of Stantec Consulting Ltd. When something has been peer-reviewed, we tend to believe that it can be trusted. Right? In the preface to Rushforth’s review he stated “the key finding will be to identify aspects that may not have been explored fully and to ensure that adequate funding to account for these is included in any estimate.” But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and when it came to the details of the cost estimates, I believe Rushforth, or his subcontractor, may have taken a shortcut. In his study, Rushforth admitted “This review utilized data supplied by the project team and assumed that these quantities are a reasonable representation of the work that will be required.” But Rushforth’s assumption seems to me to be ill-advised. The Advicas cost estimates for both the replacement bridge and the rehabilitation contain obvious errors of omission, calculation and substance. Let’s start with the figures the Advicas estimates produced and then update them to what is currently being considered. I’ll then examine these estimates—perhaps more closely than Rushforth’s $50,000 study did—and keep a scorecard of the changes that ought to be made. By the way, I should point out that MMM Group, the engineering company managing the bridge project, repackaged the Advicas numbers and added an amount for taxes and financing that Advicas did not include. So the numbers I start with may seem a few million dollars lower than what the City has been using. MMM provided no breakdown of the additional amounts they added, so for the purpose of comparing apples to apples, I am starting with the peer-reviewed Advicas estimates. I will put financing and taxes back at the end of this exercise. For the replacement option, Advicas estimated a cost of $84,989,000. For the rehabilitation option, which included a new pedestrian/cyclist bascule bridge, Advicas estimated $97,666,000. When council took rail off the new bridge, that lowered its cost by $12 million. Using the Advicas figures, the new bridge then becomes $73 million. With rail no longer on the existing bridge, the Advicas estimate for the combination of refurbishment work that would need to be done to match the replacement option becomes $74.5 million. So at the outset of this exercise, the two options are separated by only $1.5 million. The $7 million typo Now here’s where Andrew Rushforth’s assumptions about the “reasonable representation” of costs comes into play. We’ll start with something that Rushforth ought to have caught. It amounts to a $7 million dollar typo. Here’s how it goes. Advicas estimated $6,197,095 for “Roads and civil works” for the new bridge. Do you remember the pedestrian/cyclist bridge that was originally included as part of the refurbishment estimate? Remarkably, Advicas also estimated $6,197,095 for “Roads and civil works” for this bridge. Is it really possible two completely different bridges, one designed for automobiles, a rail line, bicycle lanes and pedestrian walkways would have the same civil works as a much smaller one for pedestrians and bicyclists? The individual breakdowns of costs that Advicas estimated for roads and civil works for both the new bridge and the pedestrian/cyclist bridge are exactly the same. Does it make any sense that two completely different bridges would entail exactly the same work for roads and civil works? No. It seems to me someone copied and pasted the wrong information into one of these estimates. Rushforth’s $50,000 peer review falied to catch this simple mistake. One is wrong, but which one? For the answer to that, we need to go back to April 2009. Delcan did a “Class C” estimate for a new bridge back in 2009 that set the price for a new bridge at $63 million and the City insisted for many months that was a firm and reliable price. So let’s compare it with Advicas. Conveniently, Delcan detailed their estimate for roads and civil works almost exactly the way Advicas did. But Delcan estimated those costs to be $11.5 million. In light of that, I would suggest the error in this case is in the amount assigned to the replacement bridge and that figure should be at least as high as Delcan’s $11.5 million. Didn’t the mayor say everything has increased since then? So when the engineering, contingency and escalation costs are added to the difference, the cost of the new bridge goes up by $7.4 million. That’s the seven million dollar typo. So here’s how the costs for the two bridges stands now: New bridge $80.4 million, refurbished bridge $74.5 million. The missing paint Let’s now look at something Advicas seems to have lost. Advicas allowed $3 million for painting the refurbished bridge, which, when engineering, contingency and escalation costs are included, compounds to $5 million. And for the new bridge—which its architect, Sebastian Ricard, recently confirmed would be painted—how much does Advicas allow? Zero dollars. Think about that: Five million for painting the existing bridge. Nothing for painting the new bridge. If we’re comparing apples to apples, then shouldn’t both estimates include paint? Let’s assume—a dangerous thing to do, I admit—that painting the new bridge will cost half as much as painting the old bridge. That means we should add $2.5 million to the Advicas estimate for the new bridge. So with paint accounted for, the numbers are now: New bridge $82.9 million. Refurbished bridge $74.5 million. The ignored peer review I now want to talk about something that was ignored. Rushforth’s $50,000 peer review didn’t make many recommendations, but it did recommend the contingency allowance for the new bridge be raised from 15 percent to 20 percent. But MMM Group and the City ignored their consultant’s recommendation. Claiming that an estimate has been peer reviewed and then ignoring the reviewer’s recommendation seems to me to be hypocritical. And it also seems imprudent. When Delcan produced their $63 million Class C estimate for a new bridge, they included a contingency of 30 percent. If MMM and the City had listened to the peer reviewer, they would have increased the estimate for the new bridge, compounded by the escalation factor, by $3.3 million. So let’s do that. So here are the new numbers: New bridge $86.2 million. Refurbished bridge $74.5 million. The inflated engineering costs What I want to look at next is engineering costs and whether they have been applied consistently in the estimates. In Delcan’s Class C estimates for refurbishment and replacement, they based engineering costs on a percentage of predicted construction costs. Advicas used that formula for engineering costs for the replacement bridge, but not for any of the work associated with refurbishment. Instead, for the refurbished bridge, the engineering cost was calculated on the SUM of construction costs plus contingency. This had the affect of unnecessarily inflating the cost of refurbishment by $2.5 million. Since we’re trying to compare apples with apples, let’s adjust the estimate for refurbishment downward by that amount. The score is now: New bridge $86.2 million. Refurbished bridge $71.9 million. Financing and taxes So let’s now put back the amounts we took off at the top for “financing and taxes” that MMM Group had inequitably added to the Advicas estimates. Let’s make the adjustment equitable, and add 4.5 percent to each. So here’s the final score in the price game: New bridge $90 million. Gold-plated refurbished bridge $75 million. What this all means So, can the numbers the City has presented be trusted? I believe those numbers have been fudged to show a replacement bridge would cost less than a rehabilitated bridge. And what about the numbers I’ve shown with all the adjustments? Do those numbers reflect any objective truth about what a new bridge will cost or what a rehabilitated bridge should cost? I have my doubts. I think the design of a new bridge is in its infancy, far too early for cost certainty. I believe the numbers presented by Advicas have more to do with political agendas and personal aspiration than engineering. In the days following the successful counter-petition, pro-replacement councillors were faced with either forging ahead with replacement or backing down and losing face. And whether they knew it or not, the price they thought was firm wasn’t. But they chose to forge ahead anyway. I want to show you an excerpt from a document from January 2010, recently obtained from the City through an FOI request. It’s part of a memo sent to the City’s bridge project manager, Mike Lai, from Joost Meyboom, MMM Group’s chief consultant on the project. At the time, it was clear the counter-petition challenging the City’s decision to replace the bridge was going to be successful and, perhaps worried that a referendum debate would expose the flimsiness of previous cost estimates, Lai posed a series of questions to Meyboom. The replacement option was then estimated at $63 million, and one of the questions Lai asked Meyboom was, “Do we have a firmer budget estimate for the project? Are there scope items that we may need to scale back on or eliminate to maintain the budget?” Meyboom responded, saying, in part, “The current estimate is based on limited engineering and a preliminary geotechnical investigation.” (He recently admitted than no additioal design work has been done on the bridge since the time he made this statement) The excerpt shows the reductions in scope Mr Meyboom suggested to keep costs from rising: Excerpt from a memo sent by MMM Group's Joost Meyboom to the City's Mike Lai, January 6, 2010 Several of the scope reductions that Meyboom suggested were possible—and his rationalizations of those points—call into question the arguments the City has made for replacing the bridge. Had Meyboom’s suggestions been implemented, the City would have appeared to have lost control of the project. Refurbishment would have looked like a no-brainer. So the pro-replacement councillors and staff needed a strategy that would inflate the cost of refurbishment, and councillor Madoff’’s apples to apples doctrine accomplished that nicely. She insisted a refurbished bridge must have the same seismic performance as a new bridge and the same amenities as a new bridge. Somewhere along the line, the idea that it should also have the same life expectancy came into play. Effectively, the pro-replacement councillors and staff wanted to compare two new bridges, one of which just happened to look like the old bridge. Once new costs for replacement and refurbishment were obtained, they appear to have been pushed, prodded and tweaked to produce the desired result: that refurbishment would be more expensive than replacement. So here we are, on the eve of the referendum, and I would hazard the City and their consultants have no firm idea of what a new bridge will cost. And what about a common-sense refurbishment? One that has not been captured by the politcal agendas of the pro-replacement councillors or the personal aspirations of City Hall staff? Delcan’s 2009 Class C estimate of $23.6 million took many months to develop and prices have changed little since then. There’s good reason to believe it would still hold—or at least could be made to hold if we had a city council with the will to keep costs down. If the referendum produces a “No,” the next step must be to revisit the common sense, least-cost option developed by Mr Meyboom two years ago and expanded upon by those who followed him at Delcan. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine.

August 2010 The number of six-figure salaries has increased dramatically at City Hall. But are taxpayers getting good value for their money? THAT VICTORIA CITY HALL exists in a kind of economic bubble floating well above the reality of the ordinary people that pay City Hall’s bills was confirmed in July with the publication of the City’s 2009 Public Bodies Report. Municipalities are required by law to list all positions (excepting police) for which remuneration is greater than $75,000. The City’s 2009 report showed the number of City Hall staffers making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 15 in 2008 to 50 in 2009. According to Statistics Canada (2006) only 4 percent of Canadians have annual income greater than $100,000. City Manager Gail Stephens topped the list with remuneration of $186,418.09 and expenses of $168,443.94. The City’s Director of Communications, Katie Josephson ($115,369.52) said Stephen’s high expenses “included transition costs for moving to Victoria [from Calgary] that included losses on [her] house sale” as well as “moving expenses, travel and professional dues.” Second-highest paid City staffer is Director of Parks, Recreation and Culture Kate Friars, whose remuneration of $166,503.58 was an athletic jump of 25 percent from her remuneration in 2008. Other notable leapers were Peter Sparanese ($161,051.27), who spent 2009 as Director of Engineering, and Mike Lai ($128,347.14), who spent 2009 as the Johnson Street Bridge project manager and Assistant Director of Transportation and Parking Services. Both Lai’s and Sparanese’s remuneration increased by roughly 20 percent in 2009. The report also shows that remuneration to the mayor and councillors rose dramatically after councillors (excepting Geoff Young and Chris Coleman) voted soon after the November 2008 civic election to hike their pay. In 2008, then-Mayor Lowe’s remuneration and expenses totalled $63,139.04. The Public Bodies Report shows Mayor Fortin received $106,305.60 in remuneration and expenses in 2009. Councillor’s remuneration jumped from approximately $19,000 in 2008 to $40,000 in 2009. This might, in part, explain the difference in perception between Mayor Fortin’s take on the local economy and, say, Greg Baynton’s. As you might recall, after the City announced in mid June that the cost to either fix or replace the Johnson Street Bridge had risen to roughly $100 million, Mayor Fortin appeared on CHEK TV attributing the increase over the year before to “extremely escalating” construction costs. But Greg Baynton, President of the Vancouver Island Construction Association demurred, saying construction costs had actually dropped in that time. Perhaps Mayor Fortin was projecting the economic escalation in his own life to the world in general. Meanwhile, most business owners in Victoria were characterizing the change in the local economy as lying somewhere between “brutal” and “murder.” Not long after the release of the Public Bodies Report, council was warned by City Finance Director Brenda Warner ($138,836.61) that a 4.7 percent increase in taxes in 2011 would be necessary to make up for a projected $4.7 million budget shortfall. This would come on top of a 4.3 percent tax hike for this year. Just so you know, many of the City’s highest-paid managers won’t be personally affected by these tax increases. General Manager of Corporate Services, Mike McCliggott ($153,899.56), Warner, Stephens, Sparanese and Lai all live in suburban Saanich. The link between level of compensation and the quality of decisions made by the City’s public servants and elected decision makers ought to be obvious to everyone, at least theoretically. The more taxpayers pay for help, the more talented and skilled that help will be, right? Although much of what’s done by the City is routine maintenance, every once in a while some great crisis appears and the pool of high-paid talent is there for the intense problem solving that’s going to get the City out of trouble. Like the sudden discovery that a piece of infrastructure vital to the proper functioning of the city hasn’t been properly maintained. With highly-paid talent on hand to guide elected decision makers through a rigorous examination of all possible options, residents can go to sleep at night confident that when they wake up, the crisis will be resolved. So how are they doing, the City’s talented, well-paid team of problem solvers? There probably isn’t a better example of a difficult problem that needs solving than the Johnson Street Bridge. It’s been the talk of the town for over a year, and you either know what its problems are or you’re living under the bridge. A referendum is scheduled for November and the City is going through a complex process of deciding what question to put to electors. Many people think the mayor and councillors have already decided what that question is going to be (Can we borrow the money to replace the bridge?), but they’re putting on a show of asking the public’s opinion to get brownie points for process. Genuine or not, the City’s “public engagement” process includes sending a full colour eight-page publication called The Future of the Johnson Street Bridge to 30,000 city households. The Future includes a two-page photograph of the bridge taken from the west side that highlights the remarkable lack of maintenance on the bridge over the past five years. That photo forms the backdrop for a number of statements about the bridge issue including one about “Public Safety” that I explored with the mayor, councillors, City staff, an MMM Engineering representative and seismic experts from the provincial government and Natural Resources Canada. What better way to find out if the high-paid talent is earning their keep? As you probably know, the bridge issue arose because an engineering consultant’s report—the Delcan report—claimed the bridge had seismic issues. The bridge has, in fact, survived several earthquakes without any damage, including the 1946 magnitude 7.2 crustal earthquake whose epicentre was just west of Campbell River, and the 2002 magnitude 6.8 Nisqually earthquake near Olympia. An economical decision about how to solve the problem Delcan found would require that City staff and councillors have a solid grasp on the likelihood an earthquake strong enough would occur close enough to the bridge to actually damage it. If the chance was very small, it would be an uneconomical over-reaction to immediately move to replace the bridge without considering other options first. And worse, it would be a signal, like a fly struggling in a spider’s web, to any big engineering company lurking nearby that there was a quick kill to be made in Victoria. It’s awfully easy for a big engineering company to sell “public safety” to public servants. Nobody will fault the company for trying—they’ll claim they’re just looking out for the public good. But they don’t have to balance the City’s books or worry about other priorities. So did the well-paid staff and councillors ever get that solid grasp on seismic reality? Here’s what The Future of the Johnson Street Bridge says about the seismic risk: “Public safety comes first when it comes to earthquake preparedness. Victoria is located in the most active seismic zone in Canada and recent studies have indicated that there is a 30-35 percent probability of a major earthquake (magnitude 7.0 - 7.9) occurring in Victoria within the next 50 years.” The City is implying Richter Scale magnitude and cites no source for this statement. Previously they’ve credited Delcan and/or Natural Resources Canada, but Delcan never said this and Dr John Cassidy of Natural Resources Canada has said the City would be right only if it was referring to “intensity VII shaking level. Intensity being the Mercalli Scale.” A Mercalli Scale intensity VII earthquake is roughly equivalent to a magnitude 6.0 earthquake on the Richter Scale. What’s the difference between that and the City’s “7.0 - 7.9”? A magnitude 7.0 earthquake releases about 32 times more energy than a magnitude 6.0 quake. A magnitude 7.9 earthquake would release close to 1000 times as much energy as a magnitude 6.0 earthquake. So the City’s claim is a significant overstatement of the size of earthquake likely to occur close enough to the Johnson Street Bridge in the next 50 years to damage it. How could a mistake like that be made with all the high-paid help at the City’s disposal? I questioned the mayor and councillors about the lack of attribution for this statement and asked if they were committed to providing residents with the best possible information about the seismic risk to the Johnson Street Bridge. A couple of the councillors questioned whether seismology could accurately predict earthquakes. Lynn Hunter said, “As to Dr. John Cassidy’s statement, my work with scientists over the years has taught me there are divergent opinions on most things in the scientific realm.” Pam Madoff said “I expect that the one constant that your personal research may have revealed is the unpredictability of earthquakes and the imperfection of the science of seismology...” John Luton offered a lengthy treatise on earthquakes and added, “I’m sure individual scientists are free, as Dr. Cassidy would be, to offer their opinions on the interpretation of information, but we will continue to rely on the comprehensive professional advice provided by our engineers and consultants.” Mayor Fortin said he too stood behind the information provided by City staff and consultants and cited a Natural Resources Canada study as proof of the City’s claim. But the study he cited—which uses the Mercalli Scale—confirms what NRC’s Dr John Cassidy has said, that there is a 30-35 percent chance of a Mercalli Scale intensity VII earthquake in the next 50 years. That would be a magnitude 6.0-ish quake on the Richter scale. It doesn’t, of course, say how close it will be to the Johnson Street Bridge. As Dr Cassidy pointed out in last month’s Focus, “depending on how far from the earthquake you are...10 km, 50 km, 100 km...the strength of shaking drops off quickly.” So what about the City’s consultant whose advice Mayor Fortin and other councillors say they have relied on? MMM Engineering Group’s Joost Meyboom offered exactly the same information to the mayor, council and public on June 14 as appears in the City’s brochure: A “35 percent probability of [a] major quake (M7.0 to M7.9) in next 50 years.” When asked recently where this information came from, Meyboom said “This information was developed by Dr Goldfinger at the Oregon State University and not by MMM. It is publicly available.” Dr Goldfinger’s research, which the City has never cited, was only released on May 31. And when it was pointed out to Meyboom that Dr Goldfinger’s research only applied to the southern end of the Cascadia subduction zone, not the BC coast, he suggested there were other studies but didn’t name them. But wait. There was one person who seemed to be paying attention to what the consultants were saying. Referring to the $50,000 peer review study done by Stantec Consulting’s Andrew Rushforth, Geoff Young said “Rushforth appears to be saying that the probability of occurrence of the event for which the bridge is being designed or repaired is not 30 percent over 50 years, but less than three percent. If correct, this is a significant difference that should be explained in the material [the City is sending to residents], in my view, since the increase in the cost of repair to this standard is far greater than the increase in the cost of new construction.” Bingo. Rushforth’s peer review made an unusual concession for the sake of comprehension. He listed magnitudes of earthquakes alongside the probability they would occur at the Johnson Street Bridge site. He gave a “478 year event (approximate magnitude 6.5)” a “10 percent chance of occurring in 50 years” and a “1 in 2500 year event (approximate magnitude 8.5)” a “3 percent chance of occurring in 75 years.” For those few zany people who want to know, interpolating between Rushforth’s figures for a 1 in 1000 year event (approximate magnitude 7.5), you get a 5 percent chance of occurring in 50 years. The City staffer who authored the high-probability major quake claim, Johnson Street Bridge project manager Mike Lai ($128,347.14), didn’t respond to a request for an explanation by press time. And also no word on whether councillors Madoff, Hunter and Luton are questioning the science behind Rushforth’s peer review. David Broadland is the publisher of Focus Magazine