Fixing the Kativik mess

Over the past year, Iqaluit municipal administrators and town councillors appear to have forgotten that they’re now in charge of a capital town and not a Friday night bingo game.

A harsh judgment you say? Then look at the convoluted mess they began to create for themselves last year, when they embarked upon what should have been an easy task ­ disposal of the old Kativik building, and awarding the lot it sits on to a suitable developer.

On June 14, the municipality published an advertisement that invited people to make “proposals” for development of the Kativik lot.

The week after that, they published another advertisement that looked the same, but said something quite different. The new advertisement invited people to make tender bids for the old Kativik building, as well as proposals for development of the lot.

One company, Sivulliik, appears to have responded to the second advertisement and the second set of rules, because in their proposal, they offered $42,888 in a tender bid for the Kativik building.

Two other companies ­ the Toonoonik Hotel and a company named the Tumiit Development Corporation ­ appear to have responded to the first advertisement and the first set of rules, because their proposals contain no tender bids for the Kativik building.

One building, one lot ­ but two sets of rules and two kinds of proposals.

Having made their first mistake, the Town’s administration and council then took a bad situation and made it even worse.

At a town council meeting on July 8, 1996, Sara Brown, then the municipal engineer, recommended that council accept the proposal made by Sivulliik. That’s partly because, of the three Kativik proposals, it was the only one that provided the Town with extra revenue ­ their $42,888 tender bid for the Kativik building.

By this time, the other two proponents were complaining, and rightly so, that the process was unfair, since they had apparently answered the first advertisement and had made their proposals under rules different than those that councillors were applying.

But instead of scrapping the botched process and starting over again, council turned the matter over to their development committee. On August 7, the development committee also recommended acceptance of the Sivulliik proposal.

Then, on August 13, for reasons that are still unclear, town council overturned that recommendation and awarded the lot to Tumiit.

Complicating the situation even more is the fact that one town councillor has an interest in the Sivulliik company, while another town councillor has an interest in Tumiit.

Because of that, along with some unrelated matters, various town councillors began to accuse each other of conflict of interest, with some engaging in public hissy-fits about who has the right to do what to whom.

In November, Sivulliik took the Municipality of Iqaluit to court, claiming the Town rejected their proposal improperly.

With all due respect for the courts, we believe that it’s not necessary for Iqaluit town councillors to make matters worse by spending more taxpayers money in a protracted court battle in the Sivulliik matter.

Iqaluit town councillors already ought to know what they need to know to clean up the mess they’ve made for themselves. Here’s what we think town council ought to do:

* Follow the advice of their own lawyer. Re-advertise the Kativik building and lot, this time with rules that are fair, clear, and easy to understand.

* Develop clear and fair policies for awarding commercial lots that take the public interest into account ­ all Iqaluit residents ought to have a say.

* Develop some awareness of what constitutes the public interest. Councillors are not elected to serve the private interests of developers and businesses. They are not elected to serve the institutional and bureaucratic interests of the Town’s administration. They are elected to serve the public interest. But getting some councillors and administrators to see that is like driving a nail into a block of granite.

* Develop criteria for assessing projects that take the public interest into account. If such criteria had been applied to the Kativik lot, the Pond Inlet co-op’s proposal might well have won. (Their co-op grocery store might have provided badly needed competition for Northern and Arctic Ventures, lowering food prices for everyone in Iqaluit.)

* Develop simple conflict of interest rules for councillors and staff members.

These are all useful, necessary and long overdue tasks that councillors can go to work on now. Let them begin. JB