Dan Fumano: Fight to reveal secret Little Mountain sale deal coming to city hall
Credit to Author: Dan Fumano| Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2020 01:36:49 +0000
A years-long battle to uncover the details behind a controversial sell-off of publicly owned land could spill over into Vancouver council chambers.
Vancouver Coun. Christine Boyle has submitted a draft of a motion, entitled “Transparency and Accountability at Little Mountain,” to city staff for review, and hopes to have it on the agenda for a council meeting next month. Boyle seeks council’s publicly expressed support for the “full disclosure” of documents related to the agreement, originally signed in 2008, between B.C. Housing and real estate development firm Holborn, for the sale of the six-hectare Little Mountain social housing project.
The City of Vancouver has no power to directly release those documents, but Boyle wants to throw council’s support behind retired MLA David Chudnovsky, who has been fighting for the information’s disclosure for almost two years. That Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner will likely decide later this year about how much information can be released.
Boyle’s draft motion notes that community members “have been asking to see the agreement for sale and contract for twelve years.” The City of Vancouver had previously asked for the information to be made available, to no avail.
The motion is not yet public. However, Postmedia has seen the draft.
It states, in part: “Disclosure of the contract would provide new and relevant information to the public that previously was unknown, serve the public’s interest in sound financial management by government, and help determine whether the developer has dealt fairly with the public. … Details that have emerged from recent Vancouver Sun investigative reporting suggest that the terms of the sale favoured the purchaser in unusual ways, including payment for the land being structured to extend over decades.”
“It’s really critical for us to rebuild trust in government in order to really tackle the housing crisis,” Boyle said Monday, “and so transparency and accountability matter a lot.”
Chudnovsky has been fighting for more transparency on the Little Mountain deal since 2007, when residents of the social housing complex asked him, then the NDP MLA for Vancouver Kensington, to advocate for them. The property had provided 224 non-market homes to low-income households, including many families and seniors. When those homes were demolished in 2009, Holborn pledged to rebuild all of the social housing as part of its redevelopment of the site. But the property sat mostly vacant for the next decade, to the anger of Chudnovsky and many others.
After his retirement from politics in 2009, Chudnovsky continued fighting to uncover the hidden details of the Little Mountain deal. In April 2018, he filed a freedom of information request seeking a copy of the sale contract. In February 2019, when he received a 99-page document from B.C. Housing, he was dismayed to most of the crucial details had been blacked out at the request of a “third party.”
Chudnovsky asked the information commissioner for a review. The “third party” — which Chudnovsky believes is Holborn, although the company has declined to comment when asked by The Vancouver Sun — has a deadline this week to make submissions to the commissioner. Then B.C. Housing and Chudnovsky will have opportunities to make their own submissions over the next two months.
After submissions are made, the commissioner’s office will issue a legally binding order. The process can vary depending on adjudicators’ workloads, office spokesman Noel Boivin said, but it would usually be completed within one year.
Holborn did not reply Monday to a request for comment.
Boyle has long had an interest in Little Mountain. Before the 2018 municipal election, her first time running for council, Boyle and her party OneCity decided to make Little Mountain an election issue, releasing a statement calling for the site to be rezoned to allow only rental housing on the site, instead of condos.
Chudnovsky has known Boyle for several years, and both he and his daughter, Anna Chudnovsky, are members of OneCity’s organizing committee.
Last November, Chudnovsky helped launch a campaign, which has already been supported by more than 1,000 people through an online petition, urging the B.C. government to “take back” Little Mountain.
“This is all about transparency,” Chudnovsky said Monday. “Do the people of the city — and the people who run the city — get to see and know and learn from and understand the provisions that were in this contract, so that we can inform ourselves for the future?”