City council releases material in effort to boost transparency
Jeff Lee
Sun
Vancouver city council has released five of several confidential reports involving financing of the Olympic Village project.
Saying it was withholding only a small portion of the in camera documents that relate to current financing negotiations, the city has posted on its website a number of reports from 2007 and 2008 which include the first discussions on how to finance the controversial Southeast False Creek development.
Included in the reports are council’s June, 2007 decision to give Fortress Credit Corp a “completion guarantee” and council’s October, 2008 plan to become a financial guarantor for Millennium’s $683 million loan from Fortress Credit Corp. after Fortress halted payments.
The Vancouver Sun posted copies of these two reports on its website in January after receiving them from a confidential source.
The new Vision Vancouver-dominated council of Mayor Gregor Robertson voted in February to release all of the in camera documents so that the public could see for themselves the deals written by Sam Sullivan’s former Non-Partisan Association council. But it had to await review by legal staff and also the outcome of the Richard Peck investigation into how some of the documents were first leaked to other media.
The new documents released by the city also include: the city’s decision in May, 2007 to pay $5.1 million for a property at 125 West First Avenue; another May 2007 report on a proposed $100 million interim financing deal between the city, Millennium and Quest, a financial company; and a December, 2007 report on construction agreements for the city’s parcels.
None of the newly-released documents appear to have been censored or severed for legal reasons.
The release is one of the city’s first new acts of transparency that flows from Thursday’s council endorsement of Peck’s report, in which he advocated releasing in camera information as soon as possible to the public once it is no longer considered sensitive.
“We will be changing our processes to ensure the earliest and timeliest release of in camera information as much as possible,” said Councillor Raymond Louie, the chair of the city services and budgets committee.
“We will limit the number of items we can [keep] in camera in order to ensure that we conduct our business out in public.”
Louie said the public won’t be too surprised at what is in the newly-released documents since most of the contents were reported publicly in recent months as the city moved to take over the Fortress Credit loan.
On Thursday, city manager Penny Ballem outlined a proposed process that she calls “the bucket” for releasing or keeping confidential city business.
She said she plans to put into the “public bucket” all items that can go out immediately.
Other decisions that still need to be kept confidential for a little while (such as the current financial negotiations on the Olympic Village) go into a “later” bucket.
And then, there are some things, such as personnel matters, that go into a third bucket from which the public will likely never be able to dip.
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