If you were looking for blood in the water, or a pound of flesh, then you’re likely a little on the disappointed side.
The Ma-Te-Way issue, the one where a construction project not just doubled, but essentially tripled in cost? It’s now officially closed, in all aspects, nothing more to be seen here, everybody move along.
And if you were looking for criminal culpability, put those desires away too, because the OPP has now announced that there will be no criminal charges levied against any of the actors involved in the biggest financial imbroglio to ever wash up on the banks of the mighty Bonnechere.
It’s done.
But you did get a Third Party Report right? And while that report doesn’t shy away from making assertions of culpability, or responsibility, it’s a far cry from heads impaled on spikes outside the town’s walls. Not that we’re looking for anything as medieval as that, what with its propensity for scaring the kids and small pets. But at the end of the day, town residents will have only 124 pages worth of supposed remedy, if there’s even such a thing as a remedy in any of this.
To summarize, a major capital project was initiated with an estimated cost of $18 million, a number that somebody pulled out of their nether regions. The costs then spiralled out of control in a dark comedy of error, negligence, apparent nudge-nudge wink-wink arrangements between golfing buddies, and sheer and unmitigated incompetence. The cost of all that now stands at over $30 million, with some estimates projecting the cost to balloon to over $50 million over time with interest and service costs. That’s a hell of a lot of buck for your bang, so to speak.
Shocked and outraged, or rather more embarrassed than anything else, the Town of Renfrew got to work to find out who was responsible. Transparency, accountability and responsibility were the watchwords of the time, and by all the gods they intended to get to the bottom of things in an effort to mollify local property owners and taxpayers.
They commissioned an investigative study, or Third Party Report, and one was delivered after some eighteen months of rigorous investigation. You can read it for yourself to determine whether it satisfies your blood lust or not. Initially pegged as a $30,000 task I believe, the report came in at a number some folks claim could be a tad shy of 300 grand, somewhere in the area of $294,000, admittedly an estimate. I myself have heard numbers north of $200,000 for the report, but again, I’m not privy to the official documentation that would accompany any such undertaking.
I suspect I could ask, and see where that goes.
In Renfrew we have this thing were we’re quoted prices on things, but that once underway, what was once a tiny snowball atop a hill turns into a runaway problem on the way down. Most scope changes can result in cost increases, but here in town we seem to have this tendency to have scope changes result in catastrophic cost bumps, like a doubling, or as in Ma-Te-Way, perhaps even a tripling. I’m not suggesting some pattern of conspiracy in these numbers, only pointing out the egregious cost overruns that seem to present themselves in local capital projects.
Even that Third Party Review itself seems to have had a ten-fold increase in cost if any of those numbers are anywhere near being accurate.
Sadly, t’s kind of our thing.
So, as a taxpayer, the optics are that you took a major haircut on the Ma-Te-Way build, and then commissioned a study that confirmed you took a haircut on the Ma-Te-Way build, never mind the apparent haircut you took on the study itself. That’s a lot of hair on the floor.
In other words, you’re out tens of millions of dollars on the Ma-Te-Way thing and then spent hundreds of thousands more to confirm it.
it reminds me of a little story from the Napoleonic Wars where one of Wellington’s officers is blown off his horse by artillery fire. “By God sir, i’ve lost my arm!” he cried. Wellington, in all his glory replied “By God, sir, so you have!”
But in our case, it’s just money, right? Nobody has to lose an arm.
I read the Third Party Report, something you can do at your leisure, as I’ve attached it to the bottom of this article. It does, in my mind, do a reasonably good job of identifying the issues and laying down significant bread crumbs for us to follow and consider. In the end, though, we are left to draw our own conclusions.
But there are some questions regarding the Third Party Report, two of which entered the discussion through comments made by Reeve Peter Emon at Tuesday’s meeting of Renfrew Town Council.
His first point had to do with the lack of attachments, or appendices, to support the line of reasoning and the conclusions within the report. Procedures and methodology were all explained, but there was nothing in the way of supporting documentation to buttress the assertions being made by the authors. So if there was a smoking gun found out there, somebody forgot to lock it in the evidence room. In other words, where was the physical evidence? I don’t believe the reeve was suggesting there was no evidence, but rather making the point that such evidence, if existing, was not attached to the report. But i certainly don’t pretend to speak for the reeve.
The reeve made a second point that the report may not even fulfill the requirements of the contract that brought it to life. One such omission had to do with the expectation that the report authors would offer a comparison between Renfrew and other communities nearby with respect to how capital projects are handled. No such comparison made it into the report.
This is in no way to suggest that the report is meaningless, because it’s not. But perhaps it wasn’t exactly on point with its requirements, terms of reference, scope, or contractual obligations. Smarter people than I will have to determine that.
But an investigation into cost overruns leading to cost overruns on the part of the investigator? Maybe even a ten-fold overrun?
Irony can be pretty cruel.
As to the criminal investigation, if you had a picture in your mind of a crack team of OPP detectives poring over a wall festooned with photos of people of interest with little strings connecting them together? Well, sorry, but no. I can’t state the level of focus police may have had on this, but I don’t think it approached anything you might see on a television police drama. Sorry, but I just don’t. In fact, as I went over what was available to me, I drew a similar conclusion that there would be no criminal charges brought forward on this issue. Not because that’s what I wanted to see, but only because that was what was there in front of me. Admittedly, I don’t have anywhere near the information needed to make a definitive assessment, but for right now i see a lot of things that aren’t attractive but don’t necessarily escalate to criminal behaviour.
A lot of other really bad things, yes, but no criminality.
In fact, it’s pretty convenient that the town itself referred the matter to the OPP in an exercise of face-saving as much as anything else, to give the appearance that they were doing what they could to get to the bottom of the matter at the behest of an enraged citizenry. It’s interesting that, with all the media coverage and talk about town, that the police had to be “called-in” in the first place, as if they need a bow-wrapped invitation to investigate possible criminal activity. I suspect that, left to their own, the OPP would have done nothing. I guess some say they’ve already met that challenge.
So now the current council can say that they’ve done all that they possibly can to run down the truth of the story behind Ma-Te-Way. And I suppose they have.
Honestly, what are these people to do? What have they not done? it’s not like anyone came running to be the new face for any of this, all for the low-low price of $15,000.
Most of them inherited the “garbage sandwich” that Councillor John McDonald referred to in his remarks Tuesday night. So primary culpability does not, nor should not, rest with them. But they do, however, have a duty to ensure that it never happens again, at the very least. And I’m saddened to report that, from my observations, the problems with secrecy, pissing matches, jurisdictional sovereignty, and all the rest of it are still on display at Town Hall, now as much as ever, only with different names and perhaps on a different scale. And maybe even with emerging contexts and agendas. That assessment can include both staff and politicians.
Nothing screamed the need for accountability and transparency more than Ma-Te-Way, and several years downstream, it’s not apparent that much has changed. Perhaps a tad unfair, and perhaps not a perfect assessment, but one with merit nevertheless.
So you have your report, and you have the closing of a police investigation, all I believe to be part of the communications plan to make everything go away. Now all that’s necessary is the passage of time to wash this away completely and drive it from our collective memory.
As to property owners and taxpayers in the Town of Renfrew?
I guess it’s now just a case of shut up and pay your taxes.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 