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The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources is reviewing a claim of a possible conflict of interest in the approvals for the controversial Kanata West development.
City water-resources engineer Ted Cooper has complained that the ministry official assigned to monitor the 700-hectare development, Ron McGirr, is married to Valerie McGirr, who manages the Ottawa branch of the consulting firm that did the engineering report for the project.
Mr. Cooper was an engineer on the Kanata West file for the City of Ottawa until he was abruptly taken off the project in the fall of 2004 after persistently expressing objections to the development.
Mr. Cooper has warned that some of the land in the Kanata West development near Scotiabank Place, particularly 28 hectares, could be susceptible to flooding.
This week, Mr. Cooper’s concerns about the project were supported by a consultant hired by the city’s auditor general, and the city is now promising a full review.
He wrote to the ministry last fall, saying the Ministry of Natural Resources may have been giving preferential treatment to Ms. McGirr’s consulting firm, Totten Sims Hubicki. Mr. McGirr, an engineer, was acting district planner in the MNR’s Kemptville office when he dealt with the environmental assessment study done by the firm for Kanata West.
But Ms. McGirr said the suggestion of a conflict is nonsense because her engineering expertise is not in water management and all of the water-engineering work was supervised by a director in the company who works out of Waterloo.
She and her husband were scrupulously careful to avoid any conflicts of interest and they keep their professional and personal lives separate, she said.
“I’m extremely offended by the remarks made by Mr. Cooper,” said Ms. McGirr, a transportation engineer.
She said she is confident her company’s engineering work on Kanata West will prove to be solid and the company is working with the City of Ottawa to resolve any problems.
Mr. McGirr, who no longer works for Natural Resources, could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Cooper says he was “brushed off” with a short letter from the manager of the Kemptville MNR office when he raised the conflict issue.
That manager, Alex Gardner, said Mr. McGirr had not breached the province’s Public Service Act.
Section 6 of the act says public servants shall not give preferential treatment nor should they appear to do so.
Mr. Gardner explained that the Ministry of Natural Resources is not actually approving the development, but rather just supplying comments to other parties such as the City of Ottawa and the Mississippi Valley Conservation Authority.
But in response to Citizen inquiries this week, Mr. Gardner said the ministry is doing an internal review of a possible conflict of interest. The review was prompted by Mr. Cooper’s complaint to the Kemptville office and later to the deputy minister.
“The ministry takes this type of allegation very seriously,” Mr. Gardner said.
Earlier this week, the city administration said it had called a halt to development plans in Kanata West after it was discovered that projections of water flow in the work by Totten Sims Hubicki were inaccurate.
The city’s announcement came after Mr. Cooper sent letters to Mayor Larry O’Brien and Premier Dalton McGuinty, in which Mr. Cooper said Queensway bridges and up to 1,000 houses could be threatened by floodwaters not accounted for in the consultants’ work.
The city’s auditor general, Alain Lalonde, has reviewed the issue, but has not released his report, though there is a move under way at city council to try to get these reports released sooner.
The city is also hiring an independent consultant to take a fresh look at all of the work done on potential flooding in Kanata West.
Mr. Cooper questions how well the ministry’s Kemptville office scrutinized the Kanata West project on several grounds. For instance, he says the water modelling done by the consultants was not calibrated properly to account for the real conditions in and around the Carp River, such as the fact that during major rainstorms, the water does not flow away from Kanata, but backs up from around Richardson Side Road. He also says the impact of future community development wasn’t taken into account in the study.
Yesterday, some of the major developers in Kanata West came to Ottawa City Hall and met with the mayor and Kanata South Councillor Peggy Feltmate. The group included Jack Stirling of Minto Developments, Michael Green of the Kanata West Owners Group and Susan Murphy, who was once a planner for the city on the Kanata West project, but now works for Mattamy Homes.
Ms. Feltmate said the group is upset by the controversy and convinced that the shortcomings in the water engineering work can be quickly resolved.
Kanata West, approved in principle in 2003 by city council, is planned to include about 6,300 houses, one million square metres of commercial space and 24,000 jobs.
One of the wrinkles of the story is that the City of Ottawa is one of the landowners in Kanata West, and so has the dual role of wanting development and being the government approval authority.
The Kanata West Owners Group, which paid for the consultants’ study, issued a statement yesterday saying that it expects any changes in the water projections due to deficiencies in the flood plain modelling to be minor. The group is asking Totten Sims Hubicki to re-run the modelling for the Carp River and believes revised results can be ready within a few days.
However, it could be months before a city-commissioned review of the matter is ready. After years of controversy on Kanata West, city officials, especially the three Kanata councillors, want an independent review of the water engineering issue.
“It has to be bulletproof,” says Ms. Feltmate.