NPA sympathizers seem to have taken a "hear no evil" type of approach to yesterday's release of the KPMG report on the Olympic Village.
As predicted, CityCaucus’s brief coverage of yesterday’s KPMG report on the Olympic Village completely ignores the focal point of the problems with the bid process.
Instead of addressing the fact that Millennium was in last place of three candidates after the first set of criteria yet still ended up winning the contract, Mike Klassen talks about a number of topics other than the findings within the report.
He complains about the way Mayor Gregor Robertson scrums with the media, he refers to the coverage that the project received after the problems left behind by the NPA were discovered, he reminisces about Larry Campbell’s term in office, and he talks about how the NPA slashed the subsidized housing component of the Olympic Village. Oh yeah, and he selectively posts up four comments from Frances Bula’s blog and the Province newspaper’s website as a cross-section of how “many are seeing through the Mayor’s spin.”
But throughout his entire postscript, not once does he reference the data compiled by KPMG, which is a shame in consideration of the fact that his writing partner Daniel Fontaine was the Chief of Staff to the Mayor during the bidding process.
There are some serious questions that need to be answered before obfuscation and deflection will successfully work to derail this story:
Why wasn’t the offer price a part of the first set of criteria if it was such an important part of the selection process?
Was there any other reason that the weighting of 14.5 per cent was selected for the offer price in the revised criteria other than to allow Millennium’s bid to leapfrog to the top?
What did the City do to check on Millennium’s financial position? What confirmation of fiscal stability was achieved before proceeding with Millennium as the developer?
Once again, CivicScene is challenging CityCaucus to share the wealth of insight they have on the bidding process, as Daniel Fontaine’s vantage point was one that few had access to. I’d be very curious to hear both Fontaine and Klassen’s opinion on the actual information contained in the KPMG report rather than their pontifications and critiques on how Gregor lines up behind a podium.
For my health, however, I won’t be holding my breath.
