Is there a cure for municipal fiasco syndrome?

Municipal fiasco syndrome. It’s not a new disease — but Iqaluit’s got it bad.

The symptoms are easy to spot. Typical patients suffer from the extensive leakage of other people’s money, followed by uncontrollable outbreaks of lying, excuse-making and generalized whining.

The disease also leaves lasting scars on the bodies of its victims, Iqaluit’s botched-up sewage treatment plant being a prime example.

Work on it began in 1998, under the supervision of a British Columbia company called Hill Murray, which has since gone belly-up. Four years and millions of dollars later, the building is sitting, unused, on the shores of Koojesse Inlet. It may yet become a permanent monument to the Iqaluit council’s comic history of pratfalls and blunders.

As is well known, the project cost the City of Iqaluit more than $7 million. Most of which was the territorial government’s money, handed out to Iqaluit in the form of capital grants, and paid to Hill Murray.

In addition, there’s the $500,000 or so they’ve received from a bonding company that was supposed to provide financial backup for the project. That money’s been spent on reinforcing concrete retaining walls that weren’t made properly. Iqaluit administrators were aware of this problem in the fall of 1999, but issued a $2.8-million cheque to Hill Murray anyway.

That was supposed to be the only problem with the project. At various times throughout 2000 and 2001, Iqaluit officials predicted that the plant would be operating as soon as those walls were fixed.

Meanwhile, Iqaluit was charged in 2001 for discharges of raw effluent from the outdated sewage lagoon that the new plant was supposed to replace. This week, after Iqaluit pleaded guilty, the court ordered the city to pay $100,000 in fines and other payments.

More than two years too late, Iqaluit city councillors — and the public — know the full extent of the fiasco. A consultant’s report issued to Iqaluit councillors last week shows the new plant is in much worse shape than anyone thought.

The report says that the building’s floor is sagging, and that its electrical equipment is in violation of building codes. The consultant estimates the city will have to spend additional funds to make the plant work, and that even then it may not be capable of processing the growing amounts of sewage the people of Iqaluit are expected to produce in the future.

City council has yet to make a formal decision on what it will do with this advice, and there’s no information about where it will find the nearly $4 million required for the repairs. “I think the reality is that we’ll be using the sewage lagoon for another season,” Iqaluit Mayor John Matthews told Nunatsiaq News this week. No kidding.

On CBC radio earlier this week, Matthews said that he prefers not to “blame” anyone for the sewage plant fiasco. Heaven forbid that someone might actually be held accountable.

Instead, he said, the experience ought to be used as a learning exercise. We wholeheartedly agree. So here’s our list of lessons that we think could be learned, a preventative regimen aimed at blocking future outbreaks of municipal fiasco syndrome:

• Lesson One: The community of Iqaluit and its council have so far proven incapable of handling the basic responsibilities of being Nunavut’s capital city. The government of Nunavut should play a stronger role in overseeing Iqaluit’s municipal government, especially water and sewer infrastructure development, municipal planning, and financial management. If Iqaluit continues to blunder, then the GN should take those responsibilities back and do the work itself.

• Lesson Two: The next time the municipal engineer’s job is vacated, don’t hire someone who’s under criminal investigation or facing criminal charges.

We’re referring, of course, to Denis Bedard, the Iqaluit municipal engineer who managed the botched project. Even after Bedard was charged in the spring of 1999 with seven crimes of dishonesty related to his past employment with the GNWT (three counts of fraud, three counts of theft over $5,000 and one count of breach of trust), Iqaluit’s municipal councillors were more than happy to trust him with the management of their public works department. “The town’s not going to judge him. The town’s already evaluated his work and it’s more than up to par. The town’s happy with his work,” one happy-go-lucky Iqaluit councillor told Nunatsiaq News in 1999.

• Lesson Three: Don’t write cheques to contractors for building projects that don’t work.

In the fall of 1999, the aforementioned Denis Bedard, and the acting SAO at the time, Paul Fraser, cut a $2.9-million cheque to pay Hill Murray for its work on the sewage plant. They already had an independent engineer’s report in their hands that said the plant would not work. That report was not shown to municipal councillors. Iqaluit’s auditor later said this put the municipality at “significant financial risk.”

• Lesson Four: Don’t sign contracts that place gag orders on councillors.

The contract to build the new sewage plant contained a provision that said councillors were not allowed to discuss Hill Murray’s “performance” in public. Even those few councillors who had the mental capacity to understand the seriousness of the situation couldn’t provide effective oversight. That meant there was no public scrutiny of the project, and partly explains why the full extent of the fiasco has been unknown until now.

• Lesson Five: If an administrator fails to share vital information with city council, fire him.

• Lesson Six: Don’t eat the clams.

JB