On January 14, 2009, Halifax’s brand-new sewage plant broke, and we went right back to spewing raw sewage into the harbour. How could something so important, something we spent so much time and money on, go so terribly wrong? The people had a right to know, and so I requested a copy of the engineering study of the plant failure, what came to be known as “the forensic audit.”
Mayor Peter Kelly refused to release the forensic audit, with the excuse that rules allowed him to keep it secret because the city faced potential litigation over the plant failure. And indeed, there was a good chance that the three Harbour Solutions partners—HRM, Dexter Construction and Degremont Inc. —would end up suing each other in a bid to avoid paying for fixing the failed the plant.
That summer, however, officials admitted that the forensic audit had been given to Dexter and Degremont, the potential litigants. But still they refused to give it to the public that paid for it.
At the same time, the city shifted control of the failed sewage plant over to the Halifax Regiional Water Commission. Ever since, Halifax Water manager Carl Yates has consistently denied my requests for the forensic audit—including my latest request in honour of the city’s September 26 to 30 Right to Know Week. I’ll get into those denials momentarily, but first let’s step back and look at what’s happening between the city government and Halifax Water.
It used to be that the city government ran the water department. Council set water rates and made decisions on costly capital improvements in the water system. But councillors didn’t want to be held accountable for increasing water rates, and so established Halifax Water as a supposedly independent corporation that would simply take care of water pipes and infrastructure and set the rates accordingly, in an apolitical manner. Water rates could go up, but politicians wouldn’t feel the heat.
Problem is, there’s nothing independent about Halifax Water, and there’s nothing apolitical about its actions. Halifax Water remains firmly under the umbrella of the city. Its liabilities are ultimately the city’s liabilities. And Halifax Water is making decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars about new infrastructure, with existing rate payers paying for some of the capital costs of new development.
It’d be good for the public to have oversight of the allocation of capital costs. It’d also be good for Halifax Water to have to justify publicly giving its managers raises of between 20 and 40 percent over a two-year period, while rolling those managerial salaries into a request for a 41 percent increase in rates.
But there’s no way for a citizen or a reporter to directly drill down into the numbers, question them or demand accountability. I wanted to look at the kind of documentation that I regularly review as city council makes capital budgets for things like the bus system, so I called Yates to find out when the commission meetings were so I could attend them. He refused to tell me, and said the meetings aren’t open to the public.
The end result is that city council has effectively taken a multi-billion dollar operation that used to be open to the scrutiny of public record law and open meeting rules and has hidden it behind a veil of secrecy.
Now let’s return to the forensic audit of the sewage plant failure. Yates says he can’t release it because O’Caroll’s Restaurant has a claim against Dexter Construction. But I’ve checked, and there’s no such litigation in the court system.
This is nuts. Whatever damages O’Carroll’s is claiming must be utterly inconsequential in terms of the $330 million Harbour Solutions budget, and entirely irrelevant to the forensic audit. It’s clear that Yates is simply using the excuse of a claim entirely unrelated to the forensic audit, to keep from making the forensic audit public—33 months after the plant failure. This is no way to serve the public interest.
There’s a delicious irony that the proclamation of Right to Know Week comes from mayor Peter Kelly, who was at the centre of the secret $5.4 million concert loan scandal, but I’m using the opportunity to shine some light on how the city deals with requests for public information. Each day this week I’m writing an article highlighting some aspect of our Right to Know. You can find them all at thecoast.ca/bites.
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This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 5, 2011.
You must have read a lot of Nancy Drew books when you were a kid, you always go on these wild goose chases looking to uncover a mystery or conspiracy, however unlike her you never seem to solve anything. Your articles are a twisting time vampire that always end up leaving me confused and asking myself “what the hell was the point of that?”
I was surprised by your line “But there’s no way for a citizen or a reporter to directly drill down into the numbers, question them or demand accountability.” I thought you could just do what you did with the Bayers Road widening project, take rough numbers from unrelated projects, apply your endless knowledge on construction estimating, multiply it by two or three and then produce a highly inflated price.
There was a time I stopped reading these columns, but now I figured its good entertainment, I laugh my way through it and the WWII era propaganda drawings add another chuckle. Maybe I’m wrong, you did win best journalist from the Coast last year, and I’m sure that’s unbiased….
Actually, kph06, everyone has a right to know what public money is being spent on. That is why the freedom of information act came to be in 1983.
With all the infrastructure problems that cities and municipalities are being faced with, one would expect new projects to be done right, the first time. The same can be said when talking about financials. Why are public servants getting raises or bonuses when there is always a budget crunch? Are they doing more work? Are they doing such a great job that they deserve a raise? Or, are they just greedy and know they can get away with it?
With so many questions, why would a governmental body not want to allow the press to have the information they want? For this reason alone we begin to suspect that there is something to be hidden. I would love for it to be proven that we have a fair, accountable and just government – and that there is no hidden story.
Also, Should I bring up the concert loan scandal again?
Okay. There are few things I like less than those who are utterly devoid of artistic talent (myself) criticising those who have a modicum of it, however mediocre. That being said, Graham Pilsworth sucks the impacted stool out of the colon of the week-old corpse of a guy who ate chicken hot dogs 3 times a day for the last decade. And Family Circus is funnier by far. That, I’m afraid, is a fact.
It’s funny I guess only to me. Theres a place that the 1% park down town. Half the lot is part of the plant, you’d never know it. But it had it’s problems and may have in my opinion been a huge part of the blow up. I took pic’s and sent them in to a few reporters. told them a bit of the history.
Nothing Nill Nada
Then they had the spots plocked off for 6 mo. at $12/day times 8 lots someties more. paid by the water comission who made money for the government. SO I took more pics to document part of the work.
It’s funny in the old days reporters would walk a beat like cops, but were all lazy now. watch listen learn.
This reporter is never mind no one cares, you give us a bad name dude