As is his wont when caught out by an embarrassing revelation, Gerald Tremblay blazed away at the messenger when La Presse revealed this week that the mayor and senior acolytes had expunged a vital detail from a report to city council about a major sale of a landmark public property to a private developer.
Instead of conceding the obvious -that he had acted in error -he accused the paper of being in league with a political opponent and stooping to sensationalism to boost circulation, in much the same way as he lashed The Gazette for exposing his administration's $350-million water-meter boondoggle.
In this latest case, dating to 2005, the Tremblay administration proposed to sell the heritage Viger building on St. Antoine St. E. along with two hectares of prime land for $9 million to Telemedia Development, a firm whose senior adviser, Philip O'Brien, was a contributor to the mayor's party and on the board of Tremblay's charitable foundation. The mayor says that O'Brien's connections and contributions didn't figure in the deal in any way and that the city got good value from it, considering that the best previous offer, for $6 million, had fallen through.
But if that's so, why did the mayor and former executive-committee chairperson Frank Zampino go to some lengths to excise from a summary of the deal that was presented to city council the fact that the property had been valued for tax purposes at $14.7 million?
The mayor says the valuation figure was irrelevant to the sales contract, and in any case already on the public record. If so, why go to the bother of delaying the approval process to edit the report to council as prepared by city-hall functionaries unless it was something the senior political powers wanted to hide? If the deal was indeed in the public interest, then the public interest would have been best served by full disclosure and full discussion of all the factors involved, including the valuation.
In the wake of the La Presse revelation, it was further reported by The Gazette's Linda Gyulai that such "corrections," as the mayor calls them, to reports to council by civil servants have become routine under the Tremblay administration. The recommendation from civil servants "favourable with reservations" has been systematically replaced by the more anodyne -and potentially misleading -"favourable with comments."
We pay city-hall bureaucrats for expert assessments. It is in the public interest, if perhaps not always the mayor's, that their expertise be transparently shared.