Return to Bulletin Index Bulletin SAVE UNION STATION - Bulletin No. 22, March 8, 2004. ***** The last Bulletin, No. 20, was dated July 21, 2003 - just a few days before the vote of City Council to approve a 100 year lease for Union Station with the Union Pearson Group. We were discouraged enough at the time - the vote was an overwhelming 31 to 10 in favour of the long lease when we had expected something much closer and maybe a lease for no more than 40 years - to not even post a report of the dismal council meeting by Bulletin or on the web site. But our energy has been harnessed once again, and Union Station is once again on the public agenda. This Bulletin gives the latest news. If you care about Union Station, please call your councillor - advice on getting names and numbers is on our web site. ***** In this issue: 1. Where things stand now 2. A brief chronology of events, 2000 - 2004 3. Major issues to still be resolved 4. A proposed course of action **** 1. Where things stand now The Union Station matters will be next discussed on April 7, at the Toronto South Community Council. On February 5, the Planning and Transportation Committee considered the staff report recommending that Union Station be rezoned to permit the Union Pearson plan, and, as almost an afterthought, proposing that a Master Plan for the Station required by the 1991 council decision be approved. To put it mildly, the committee was not impressed by the staff report. Councillor John Filion asked why our group and others who had expressed an interest in Union Station in the past had not been notified of the public meeting on the rezoning held on November 19. Patti Simpson, the city lawyer in charge of the Union Station deal, said she thought those people (including our group) were interested in the bidding process, but not in a rezoning for the building. Filion then asked what Simpson thought about the fact only three people attended the meeting. Simpson said she interpreted that as meaning that people were generally satisfied. The answers to these simple questions were so outrageous that they changed the whole tone of the meeting. The councillors became very wary. They questioned why the Master Plan had not been prepared before this time and why it had not been the subject of public hearings. As staff tried to downplay the importance of the Master Plan, the councillors became concerned. Why wasn't a Master Plan prepared at the very start of the bidding process? Was there a good reason for staff not to prepare public objectives against which the bids could be assessed? Councillor Bill Saundercook caught the dilemma. "Is the cart before the horse?" he asked rhetorically. Saundercook asked why the Master Plan drafted by staff didn't require escalators between the concourses and the platforms, and was told by staff that GO Transit doesn't want them because they don't think it is safe to have escalators leading to a platform. The councillor then asked the obvious next question: doesn't the TTC have escalators serving its platforms? Does that mean the TTC is unsafe? "There's been an appalling lack of public process," noted Filion. "It boggles my mind." Other members of the committee shared his concerns in varying degrees. The committee referred to whole matter to the Toronto South Community Council at its meeting on April 7 for public consultation on the Master Plan, and to consider retaining an independent consultant - someone more removed than the staff who have been so eager to give the 100 year contract to the Union Pearson Group - to draft an appropriate Master Plan. The need for a Master Plan means there's a good chance that city council will pause to draft its list of public objectives against which any bid should be assessed. This provides a good opportunity for a review of the whole matter. 2. A brief chronology of events Union Station has been around for more than three years now, which means it is very easy to forget exactly what has occurred during this long and confused saga. Save Union Station has put together this chronology as a reminder of what has happened, and as a way of helping the new councillors be brought up to speed quickly. One tends to forget that there was not one vote by the Selection Committee but two, that LP Heritage won the first vote, and were it not for the `patently unreasonable' vote of the Commissioner of Urban Development Services, would have won the second vote as well - yet Union Pearson is being treated as the preferred bidder. We tend to forget that no member of council has ever seen either bids, that no member of council knows what the financial offers are from each bidder. We lose track of the fact that the person responsible for requiring city staff to admit that the ballots of the Selection Committee were wrongfully destroyed has been fired and is now suing the city. We forget that after denying for so long he had a possible conflict of interest, Mayor Lastman finally declared that conflict. So here's a brief chronology since August 2000, when the city reacquired ownership of Union Station and determined it did not have the $16 million needed to make repairs. * 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. 3. Major issues still to be resolved There are many issues still to be resolved. This might happen within the context of a Master Plan for the Station, as required by the 1991 council decision. The Save Union Station Committee have outlined a number of important public objectives that should be addressed in this document including: * Maintain public areas in public control * Maximize Public use of the Great Hall * Ensure the Beaux-Arts standard of design is maintained * Ease the vertical movement between the building's levels with escalators, and make wide, comfortable platforms * Create a handy taxi and drop-off area * Devise a reasonable balance between uses * Plan for appropriate additional density proposals in advance These ideas are further elucidated on our web site http://www.saveunionstation.ca 4. A proposed course of action We believe the most appropriate action is to follow the 1991 City Council requirement to prepare a Master Plan, setting out the public objectives for the redevelopment of Union Station. It should have been created before the bidding process began but was not. A Master Plan is needed so City Council - and the public - may know with some clarity exactly what are the objectives in redeveloping the Station. Without a Master Plan, there is no set of principles against which any bid or proposal can be evaluated. The drafting of a Master Plan should be given to an independent consultant. Senior city staff have been too closely aligned with the faulty bidding process and the awarding of preferred bidder status to the Union Pearson Group for staff to provide the kind of advice that is seen to be independent and professional, and that's what is needed for a document outlining public objectives. Once drafted, the Master Plan should be debated in a process of public consultation, and finally put to City Council for a final decision. During this period, the current bidding process, and the drafting of agreements, should be put on hold. Once a decision is made on the Master Plan, the two bids that have been submitted to the City should be made public and assessed against the Master Plan. On the basis of this assessment, City Council can decide to proceed with Union Pearson, according to whatever amendments are appropriate, proceed with LP Heritage, or embark on a new process with different terms of reference. The starting point is hiring an independent consultant to draft a Master Plan outlining the public objectives for Union Station. We urge you to phone your councillor to ask that this course of action be agreed to. Union Pearson remains the preferred proponent, but the final terms of the contract have not been reported to Council, and no contract has yet been signed with the company; the bidding process remains one that City Council may still end and walk away from without liability. Rather than take this step at this time, it seems more appropriate to fulfill the 1991 Council requirement for a Master Plan, then determine an appropriate course of action. ********* Our Email address is signup@saveunionstation.ca and please visit our website at http://www.saveunionstation.ca

Contact Us: info@saveunionstation.ca