Save Union Station - Background

Background

Letter to Gordon Chong and the Board of Go Transit, March 10, 2003

CHRONOLOGY 2000-2004

* In August 2000 the city of Toronto reacquired ownership of Union Station, the city's vital transportation hub and historic building. The Station needed repairs valued at $16 million, money which the city said it didn't have.

* City Council decided to seek private bids to redevelop the Station, offering developers a long-term lease. In 2001 city staff and outside advisers wrote up a Request for Proposals (RFP) and circulated it widely.

* Following the RFP's guidelines, three bidders were financially pre-qualified and two bids were eventually submitted. One bidder was the Union Pearson Group (UPG), a consortium of largely Canadian companies. Larry Tanenbaum, owner of the Air Canada Centre, plays a leading role in UPG. UPG includes the firm Jones Lang Lasalle, which was involved with the retail side - not the design side - of the rehabilitation of Grand Central Terminal in New York.

The other bidder was LP Heritage + (LPH), a Chicago-based group including some Canadians and Beyer Blinder Belle, the U.S. architectural firm responsible for the renovation of Grand Central Terminal.

* To evaluate bids, the city established a selection committee comprising three city staff members and three outside experts in different fields. Nine criteria were established for evaluation.

*The bids included financial and design components, but were never shown or made available by city staff to councillors for comparison. Nor did the public have access to either bid, or any input into assessing the two bids. Management of the process was exclusively in city staff hands; they would report their progress to Council, and councillors would cast votes periodically on the basis of staff reports. Such an arrangement, with no provision for continuing Council or public involvement and oversight, led to a suspicion of intended secrecy.

* On May 8, 2002, the selection committee met and voted, choosing LPH as the preferred bidder.

* On May 9, 2002, UPG sent a letter to the city raising doubt about the financial viability of LPH, even though both bids had been financially pre-qualified. LPH was not advised of the selection committee's doubt in its financial health, nor was Council. Instead, in secrecy the selection committee decided to reconsider the matter and to take a second vote.

* On June 17, 2002, the selection committee reconvened. Several members changed their votes, apparently in response to the "new" financial information. The Commissioner of Urban Development Services gave three zero scores to LPH in the financial category, the result of which was that UPG had the higher score and displaced LPH as the preferred bidder.

* Neither City Council nor the public knew that two separate votes had been conducted (with opposite outcomes) until the release of the Osborne Report ten months later, noted below.

* In July 2002, acting on staff reports that did not detail the two votes taken, City Council agreed to select UPG as the preferred bidder, and instructed staff to prepare the appropriate legal documents.

* At several meetings of the Administration Committee in the late fall of 2002 and early 2003, citizens, including the Save Union Station Committee, made deputations expressing great concern about public exclusion from the process. Also, according to the scant information available, the winning bidder seemed to be focusing on retail matters rather than the vital transportation ones.

* Dale Lastman, son of then-mayor Mel Lastman, was known to be a business associate of Larry Tanenbaum, a major figure in UPG. There were many allegations that the mayor had a possible conflict of interest and should recuse himself from any involvement in Union Station matters. The mayor dismissed these concerns until early in 2003, when he declared he had had a conflict since early in December 2002.

* In January 2003, it was learned - as a result of a Freedom of Information request - that the city's lawyer handling Union Station had destroyed the ballots of the Selection Committee, contrary to law and practice. This raised concerns about how UPG had been selected.

* In February 2003, in response to strong public outcry, Council agreed to ask the provincial integrity commissioner, former judge Coulter Osborne, to review and report on the bidding process.

* On May 22, 2003, Judge Osborne released his report. The report included much information that had not before been made public, such as the two votes by the selection committee, and the detailed scores awarded on each vote. Judge Osborne found no willful wrongdoing and said that he considered the process had been "on balance, fair to both proponents." He noted there were several parts of the process that he would have handled differently had he been making the decisions, and he made recommendations for improvement of a similar future process. He made particular reference to the decisive zero scores of the Commissioner of Urban Development Services as "a gross overreaction" and "patently unreasonable."

* Rita Reynolds, Director of Corporate Access and Privacy (responsible for the city's Freedom of Information office) was fired in May 2003 for not being a "team player." She was the one who required that the public be told about the ballots' destruction, an act that was against law and against practice. Ms Reynolds has since commenced a lawsuit against the city for wrongful dismissal.

* On July 24, 2003, City Council voted to confirm UPG as the preferred bidder, and instructed staff to continue preparing the legal documents giving UPG a 100-year lease on Union Station. Those reports have yet to be prepared and submitted to council for consideration.

* November 10, 2003, municipal election.

* City staff called a public meeting for November 19, 2003, to discuss the rezoning required for changes to the Station building. Notices were placed on the city's Web site and in the announcement-of-public-meeting sections of two newspapers. None of the people who had made deputations to the Administration Committee or had expressed any concern about the flawed process for the Station's redevelopment were notified of the meeting. Three persons showed up. (When asked at a City Council Committee meeting on February 5 why none of those obviously engaged with the issues had been contacted, Patti Simpson, the city lawyer for the redevelopment, said she thought they were interested only in the bidding process, not the rezoning, and that the small turnout meant that the public was satisfied.)

* On January 12, 2004, city staff submitted their report "Rezoning Application, 61-71 Front Street East." The rezoning would allow the redevelopment proposed by Union Pearson to proceed. Hidden in that report was a "Master Plan" that staff wanted to have approved. Staff noted that in 1991 City Council had decided that a Master Plan outlining public objectives for the redevelopment of Union Station must be prepared before redevelopment occurred. The Master Plan in this report has not been subject to public discussion, and it does not address key public issues regarding the transportation future of Union Station. It appears to do little more than justify, after the fact, the UPG plan for Union Station.

* On February 5, 2004, after hearing from some members of the public, the Planning and Transportation Committee decided to refer the whole matter of the Rezoning and Master Plan to the Toronto South Community Council for public consultation and to consider whether an independent consultant should be retained to draft the Master Plan.

* This matter will be before the Toronto South Community Council on April 7, 2004.