Everyone at city hall is expecting a big storm to hit when two audits are release on the fire hall land swap debacle and recent real estate transactions.

However, there should be a mini storm in the mean time over the revelation that bureaucrats blatantly ignored a council directive to cancel a property management contract with Shindico. Or say the fact the improperly administered contract likely cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars more than necessary.

This issue says a lot about who is wearing the pants down at city hall.

The property management contract in question involves the former Canada Post building that the city of Winnipeg bought and is planning on turning it into a police headquarters. In 2010, Shindico was handed a contract for managing the property (things like picking up cheques from tenants, making sure common areas like hallways are clean, etc.)

But the issue is that no other companies had a chance to bid on the work.

A document obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), a donation-based taxpayers watchdog organization, shows Shindico received $157,621 in 2010 alone through the contract.

In October 2012, the CTF and Brian Kelcey, founder of State of the City Research, presented before the city’s Property and Development Committee and explained to councilors how the contract wasn’t handed out in a fair manner.

The committee agreed with our conclusions and at their next meeting on November 6, 2012 they ordered the contract canceled in “90 days.” If you whip out your calendar and add 90 days to November 6, that takes means the contract should have been done around February 6 or so.

But a city document that surfaced last week shows the administration kept the contract going until June 30, 2013. Thus, they kept it going for more than 230 days.

Quite frankly, the members of the Property and Development Committee should be livid right now that their directive was completely ignored by city bureaucrats. Again, we’re not talking about staff letting the contract go five or ten days longer than expected – it went more than 150 per cent longer.

Not to mention, real estate issues like the one in question were a major political hot potato at the time; this wasn’t some small administrative matter that someone made a mistake on.

But it gets better. Now the city’s administration is reporting that instead of hiring a private company to do the work, the city can save $349,000 over the next three years by having city employees do the same work in-house.

If the city can do the work for far less than what private firms charge, why did it hand the contract over to Shindico in the first place? How much could have been saved over the past three and a half years by either finding a different company or by doing the work in-house?

How the city responds to this problem speaks volumes. Will they just shrug their shoulders or will heads roll? The latter should happen or council may as well pack up shop and continue to let the administration call the shots.

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