Hold the City Accountable for Repeating the LRT Mistakes

An open letter to Nathalie Gougeon, Auditor General of Ottawa

As always, please share any comments or thoughts. Just know that I’ll be incommunicado until mid-December.

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Dear Ms. Gougeon

A divided community

You have seen how the Lansdowne 2.0 decision has divided the community.

For many, the question boils down to whether rebuilding a stadium is the best use of scarce taxpayer dollars, or whether that money should be used for higher priorities such as fixing transit or providing affordable housing.

Councillors and the public are concerned that we are repeating the mistakes of the LRT. Namely that the mayor and staff, as Justice Horigan in his LRT Public Inquiry Report warned would happen, are working to:

“control the narrative by the nondisclosure of vital information or outright misrepresentation”.

Time for real answers

Many citizens feel betrayed by Council. That a majority of Councillors would spend half a billion dollars on what is effectively corporate welfare for some of the richest businessmen in Ottawa.

We need you to speak the truth. To determine if this is all a misunderstanding and Council is acting in the best interests of the public. Or if not, to call out Councillors for failing in their duties to the people of Ottawa.

Ms Gougeon, you might be the our last hope that governance in Ottawa is not irreparably broken.

Two questions

When you conduct your agile audit of Lansdowne Park in 2024, I would ask you to consider two key questions.

1. Did Councillors choose to deliberately disregard key information that weakens the financial case for Lansdowne, and in so doing, fail in their effective responsibilities as fiduciaries to the people of Ottawa?

2. Did staff misrepresent the narrative around the sale of land at Lansdowne, and in so doing, not disclose or outright misrepresent vital information on whether we are selling off parts of a public park?

1. Disregarding key financial information

The success of Lansdowne is based on rosy financial projections out to 2066, including most importantly that retail mortgages will produce over a billion dollars in profits.

Those projections were keyed off estimated 2022-23 retail revenues of $13 million — even though prior to the decision, the actual 2022-23 numbers were reduced to $11 million. A $2 million reduction extrapolated over four decades will produce a very different result, to the point that the partnership might be far less viable.

Why did the staff report not:

• re-run and update those projections using actual data?

• incorporate the risks to these projections of the Senators building a competing sports and entertainment district nearby, or of one or more sports franchises folding?

• evaluate forecasts against the actual performance of previous forecasts provided by the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group?

(There is a whole set of additional questions around costs, but let’s assume those will be answered in 2024, after the City has spent a further $10 million to rework those estimates.)

2. Who will own land at Lansdowne

Lansdowne is a public park. It has been in public hands for close to a century and a half. Violating public ownership of Lansdowne would be a red line for many Ottawa citizens.

I have previously documented how, during the first two days of Lansdowne discussions, the Mayor and City staff misled Councillors and the public on the fact that a significant parcel of land will be sold off to private developers for a period of time. After being asked many times if land would be sold off to private developers, staff finally responded that this was the case.

They added that any sales would include covenants to repurchase the land. But as we are seeing with the Kanata Golf and Country Club, once a parcel of land is sold, it becomes hard to enforce any covenants that may have been previously placed on the original sale of that land.

Any “temporary” sale of Lansdowne land could be anything but temporary.

Despite this admission, when the second round of Council discussions on Lansdowne took place on November 8-10, city staff doubled down on their assertion that no lands would be sold to private hands.

Mayor Sutcliffe: “If I could ask the city manager perhaps to speak to that; that my understanding is that we are not selling any land; that we will continue to own all the land. I mean obviously the people who own condominiums in the current building that's standing on Bank Street have the right to sell their condominium to another owner. Is there anything different from that that's about to happen here?”

City Manager Wendy Stephenson: “Thank you Mr Mayor. What we're proposing is exactly the same as what was proposed in Lansdowne 1.0. There's no difference with respect to that. We're not selling the land under the Event Centre whatsoever. The city will continue to have ownership of that.”

Well that sounds pretty clear. The Mayor asks for confirmation that we will continue to own all the land. The City Manager confirms that is the case.

Here is the actual exchange from 8 November (starting at 1:05:20)

Does gaslighting matter if it is technically not a lie?

The only problem is that, while what the City Manager is technically not lying, it is misleading and does not answer the Mayor’s real question.

He asked two questions. Is the City continuing to own all the land? Do existing Lansdowne condo owners have the right to sell their properties?

She only answered the second.

Stephenson notes that we will be doing exactly what we did in Lansdowne 1.0.

So what did we do with Lansdowne 1.0?

It turns out that we did sell off public land around the perimeter of Lansdowne Park. See the diagram below that I was sent by a reader — someone who was involved in the Lansdowne 1.0 debate and who eventually received this information from the city after continued asking.

In Lansdowne 1.0 , the City sold off some Lansdowne land along Bank Street and Holmwood.

How many people knew that?

So when Stephenson says “what we're proposing is exactly the same as what was proposed in Lansdowne 1.0” she is saying that we will sell off land.

When she says, “we're not selling the land under the Event Centre whatsoever. The city will continue to have ownership of that”, she is referring to the land DEEP UNDER the event centre and its parking garage. She is avoiding talking about the surface level — which is what everyone is really concerned about.

That surface level will be sold to a private developer.

The City will include in its sales contract a right to repurchase after construction is completed. But as appears to be the case in Canadian case law, there are many circumstances in which any such covenants can be broken.

To answer the Mayor’s original question — will we continue to own all the land? —the answer is NO. Certainly not for a decade or more under the proposed agreement. Perhaps not forever.

Over to you, Ms Gougeon

Auditor General.

I don’t think the Mayor understands the full implications of his plan to renovate Lansdowne Park when we have far more important priorities. Many people interpret this project as bailing out the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, using taxpayer money. They see a proposal based on unreliable projections and communicated to the public through half-truths and deception.

Lansdowne has the potential to tear this city apart. People are giving up any remaining faith they have in their local government.

Will you stand up and speak truth to the people of Ottawa?