Open Competition

Apparently City Council is to be provided with details concerning the bidding process for residential and office development at Lansdowne Park. We have already been told that Minto was selected for the residential projects but that no acceptable bid was received for the office building proposed for Bank Street. A Fairness Commissioner was appointed to oversee the competition.
All this is fine... so far.
But what will be interesting to learn is the number of bids received for the residential part of the competition. If there were many bidders, that is a good sign. If there were few, we should be concerned.
I fear that there is a sense in the community -- whether right or wrong -- that the fix is in. If that is what developers think, they would not bother bidding.
If there were few bidders we should not blame Minto, the fault lies entirely with the City. Just think back to the City's actions in earlier stages of the Lansdowne redevelopment project.
Because of the redevelopment of Lansdowne, it was determined that trade fair facilities would need to be built elsewhere. The City staff proposed to simply offer City funds to Shenkman Corp. to erect such a facility. Some Councillors thought that was a bit much -- maybe someone else could submit a competitive proposal. So the City ran a competition and Shenkman was the only bidder. This was not surprising -- City staff had already announced that they wanted to give the project to Shenkman. Now it is quite possible that Shenkman was by far the most competent firm to erect and run the trade fair facility. It has now opened on time under the name CE Centre, apparently with good success.
But the original idea of simply granting the job to Shenkman without competition compromised badly the subsequent competition. The fault is not with Shenkman, nor Council (for once); the blame is entirely with City staff.
So now we wait to learn about the competition for the residential buildings. I hope that the tainted competition for the exhibition facility did not negatively affect the competition for the residential development.

Battle of the press conferences

Today we have had the pleasure of two press conferences on the proposed Lansdowne partnership project.

In the morning, Prof. Ian Lee from Carleton's Sprott School of Business gave his interpretation of the documentation on the project. His reading of the financial structure of the project coincides closely with my own views expressed in earlier postings to this blog.

Media reports indicate that in the afternoon, Mayor O'Brien claimed that Prof. Lee's interpretation was all wrong. When pressed to cite an example of error, apparently the Mayor had no response for reporters.

I was surprised to learn that the Mayor complained that Prof. Lee has a Ph.D. in public policy. The Mayor complained that the criticism had not come from a person with "a more astute understanding of finance". Apparently no one bothered to inform Mr. O'Brien that Prof. Lee was formerly a banker who had Shenkman Corp. as a client.

It will be very interesting to hear some specific rebuttal from OSEG or City spokespersons who may have a "more astute understanding" than that demonstrated today by the Mayor.