NEWS: On the campaign trail Katz on defensive over Veolia contract

August 30, 2010
Winnipeg Free Press

Details can't be made public, mayor says

MAYORAL candidate Judy Wasylycia-Leis says Mayor Sam Katz is protecting "a foreign company's business interests" at the expense of the Lake Winnipeg watershed because the city has not made public its consulting contract with Veolia Canada.

Katz dismissed the criticism as disingenuous campaign posturing from a former MP and MLA who knows government contracts with private entities are never made public.

On Sunday afternoon, Wasylycia-Leis invited reporters to her Portage Avenue campaign headquarters to demand the mayor release details about a city consulting contract with Veolia, the company chosen to help Winnipeg's new water, sewer and power utility conduct $615 million in improvements to two of the city's sewage-treatment plants.

The contract was approved by council in May and has yet to be signed. It can't take effect until Winnipeg creates its new utility -- which won't happen until the province develops regulations to govern the new utility.

Nonetheless, Wasylycia-Leis said the public must be able to scrutinize the Veolia deal to ensure the environment and the city's financial interests are protected.

"We're talking about locking the people of Winnipeg into a secret deal for the next three decades. Backroom deal-making that compromises public oversight of our water should have no place in the city," she said in a prepared statement.

The Veolia deal has nothing to do with water treatment. The city intends to use the firm's expertise to reduce the probability of cost overruns during the construction of new treatment facilities at the North End and South End water pollution control centres, which are components of the city's ongoing $1.8-billion wastewater upgrade.

In 2007, cost overruns at the West End sewage-treatment plant were blamed in part on a lack of communication between designers and project managers.

As a result, the city wants to place consultants in the same offices as utility staff.

Utility project manager Bryan Gray has said no more than 15 Veolia employees will work with the city at any given time over the course of a 30-year contract, which may end at any time.

But Wasylycia-Leis said the city is being secretive about the precise duties Veolia staff will conduct. She called on the mayor to make the Veolia contract public or at the very least make the company's role completely clear.

Katz said Wasylycia-Leis knows there's no way confidential information can be made public, given her years of experience as an NDP MP and MLA.

"I understand it's campaign time, so my opponent will resort to criticism instead of solutions or new, creative ideas and there is nothing that her political machinery says that surprises me," he said.

The mayor said the city is interested in doing whatever it can to improve the Lake Winnipeg watershed and that includes lobbying the province to make phosphorus removal, not nitrogen removal, a wastewater-treatment priority, as leading freshwater scientists have suggested.

Wasylycia-Leis said she has yet to develop a position on nitrogen removal.

Winnipeg voters go to the polls on Oct. 27.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca

 


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