Dawson Council Faces a Tough Decision

by Dan Davidson

Dawson’s council faces a difficult choice. By April 6 the members must decide whether to follow the direction of Financial Supervisor Andre Carrel or to defy his orders and face what Community Services Minister Glen Hart has said will be dissolution of the council.

Council has been ordered to rescind a garbage contract it had awarded to Callison Waste Management and give it instead to Ed Repair, a lower bid, but not on a comparable offer of service.

Bill Holmes doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. Photo by Dan Davidson

“There is not an appetite on council to do this,” Mayor Glen Everitt told a public meeting on March 25.

So convinced is council that this is the wrong decision to make that the mayor plans to table all the documents in the case so that the public can see for itself exactly why council reached the decision it did.

Councillor Wayne Potoroka stated that he was “a little dismayed” by Carrel’s public condemnation of the council’s choice as a “Cadillac” system, made on CBC radio a week after Carrel first attacked the council’s decision and told them to reverse it.

Despite the fact that he had already reached his decision two weeks before March 25, a document

Wayne Potoroka is dismayed by the actions of the financial supervisor. Photo by Dan Davidson

dated that day was read by the mayor in which Carrel stated that he had, that day, completed his review of all the paperwork in the case and reached the same decision. Included with that, though Carrel is not yet the trustee for the City of Dawson, were two draft letters to the contractors which the mayor had been instructed to sign and send.

Councillor Bill Holmes also resented Carrel’s bombast: “The whole way that this issue has been addressed in the media by Mr. Carrel is ... annoying. We did good work to address an issue that’s going to get worse over the next five years. It’s a solid proposal and we’re been told that it’s not acceptable - and I don’t understand why.”

Holmes indicated that what might motivate him to vote to rescind council’s contract award was the fear that Andre Carrel might be awarded the trusteeship job if the council was dissolved.

Everitt questioned whether that had not already happened in all but name, with Carrel freezing the town’s bank accounts, okaying all spending, issuing his own contracts to locals without consulting council or the administration, and micromanaging the handling of city tenders for work.

There’s nothing like an impending crisis to fill council chambers. Photo by Dan Davidson

Government Orders Awarding of Garbage Contract

by Dan Davidson

Financial Supervisor Andre Carrel and Minister of Community Services Minister Glen Hart have ordered Dawson’s council to award its garbage hauling contract to the lowest bidder in the request for proposals which was issued in January.

The $95,000 per year contract is to be awarded to Ed Repair (owned by Edgar Blattler) for five years in spite of the fact that neither of Blatter’s two submissions to the RFP stipulated how long he would offer the service for.

Setting a term for the service was a requirement of the RFP process according to Mayor Glen Everitt, who agreed with several members of the audience of fifty or so at the March 25 special public meeting that the failure to do so probably makes the Ed Repair submissions invalid.

Everitt said the government’s decision amounted to taking a detail from another submission and adding it to the one they wanted to hire. Jorn Meier, of Klondike Infotech, said he prepares a lot of proposals and he, personally, would object strongly if someone took some of his terms and applied them to someone else’s proposal.

Some in the discussion felt that the government’s order placed the city in a position to be sued by Callison Waste Management, the firm to which the city originally awarded the contract for garbage collection. Wayne Rachel, a partner in the Callison operation, said he had no comment when asked about his options after the meeting. He had already been working under the new contract, which was awarded to him in late February.

There were questions at the meeting as to whether the contract with Callison had been the “Cadillac” service that Andre Carrel called it in his CBC interview of March 19, but one questioner, Helen Bowie, concluded that while the Callison proposal was about $21,000 more than Ed Repair’s lowest, the town would have been “getting a lot of bang for the buck” in that contract.

It should be noted that Ed Repair’s bid was only the lowest in the bare bones range of collection, what Everitt called “pick up the trash and take it to the dump”. The city asked for RFPs in order to improve on that level of service, noting a need for improved collection along the waterfront, in the Dome subdivisions, along Front Street, and in the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in’s C4 subdivision, which did not exist when the last contract was tendered.

Six proposals came in from three companies. Three of these were at the most basic level of service and were eliminated for that reason. Three others, two from Callison and one from Ed Repair, were examined. Ed Repair’s was the most expensive, which left council looking at two submissions from Callison. After an extensive analysis, council picked the $117,000 proposal,, which was still within the parameters of the financial plan agreed to between Dawson and Carrel in January.

In those negotiations, Carrel had insisted that two previously distinct line items in the budget - garbage collection and landfill management - be combined into one with a expenditure line of $171,400, some of this being allocated to garbage collection and the rest to manage the landfill. This merging led to quite a bit of confusion at the public meeting.

With this restructuring of the budget line, the town decided to revamp its bylaws. On March 16 council tabled first reading of Bylaw #04-13, a Waste Management Bylaw.

This bylaw would provide for new waste management fees and a series of tipping fees to assist in the cost of dealing with items like tires, batteries and used oil at the Quigley Landfill. It would also provide a mechanism for charging Klondike Valley residents outside the town boundaries for the use of the dump. A succession of territorial governments have refused to honour the commitment made when Quigley was selected for the new landfill site, by failing to remit to the town part of the territorial taxes collected in the valley in order to help cover these costs.

The current government has just indicated that, while it might deal with this in the future, it will not do so retroactively, and council has been instructed to remove that amount from its accounts receivable ledger.

The proposals for waste management fees included a raise in the annual charge levied along with the utility bill in all categories of users. For instance, residential users went from $75 annually to $100.

The highest raise was a $500 fee for restaurants and grocery stores, which a Callison conducted survey showed were the largest producers of garbage by category. Thursday night’s audience agreed in principal with most of these changes, suggesting only that they might be pro-rated according to actual volume, the example being that seasonal operations or those which are mainly take-out in nature probably shouldn’t be paying the same rate as a year round restaurant.

That part of the discussion may be moot, since Carrel has ordered the council to revoke the $500 fee for restaurants, even though it hasn’t actually been passed yet, and only one restaurant complained. Council was surprised by this since Carrel had made such a big deal about moving to a user pay philosophy when creating the financial plan, and had also indicated that he wasn’t interested in what they remember him calling the “picky details” of the administration, so long as they met the goals of the plan.

Bylaw #04-13 is only in the development stages now, Everitt said. While it was tied to the garbage contract, it was necessary to select a new contractor since the old contract had expired. Council had suggested to Carrel that it could simply extend Callison’s contract at the old rates until the bylaw was ready to be given third reading sometime in August, and then call for new tenders based on the final shape of the bylaw, but Carrel has said no to that request.

One, more radical, suggestion came from Mark Lombard, who had done a study of waste management for the government of Nova Scotia in 1999. In Lombard’s opinion the town could cut its cost and simplify its administrative burden considerably by simply reducing its garbage pick-up activities to residential only and requiring businesses to do their own or hire an approved contractor to do the work.

Everitt said all these items and others will be taken into account in the next draft of the bylaw, which will still be open for discussion and amendment for some time.

Dawson’s Financial Blues - an extract from Hansard, the official record of the Yukon Government’s Legislative Debates

Question re: Dawson City supervisor position

Mr. Cardiff: I have a question for the Minister of Community Services. Will the minister now admit that his decision to hire a consultant from British Columbia to supervise Dawson City's financial affairs was a mistake and that that has seriously damaged the relationships between the Yukon government and the municipality of Dawson City?

Hon. Mr. Hart: For the member opposite, we are handling Mr. Carrel, he is dealing with the City of Dawson's financial situation and we are confident in his abilities.

Mr. Cardiff: Well, Mr. Speaker, the minister can't stick his head in the sand any longer on this one and pretend that there is nothing going on here.

The other night in Dawson City, there was another angry public meeting. Now, Dawson residents said that they have had enough of the minister's hired gun micromanaging their community. As one person put it at the meeting, this person has essentially been paid $40,000 to take a dump in their back yard.

Unparliamentary language

Speaker: Order please. One cannot bring into the House language that is unparliamentary. So I would ask the member not to do that. Please carry on.

Withdrawal of remark

Mr. Cardiff: Sorry, I will withdraw that.

The consultant has interfered in contract decisions by the elected council and has even demanded videotapes of public meetings. He has even been threatening to the council. In short, he continually seems to be pouring gasoline on the fires that he is lighting.

Will the minister confirm that he attempted to replace this outside consultant with someone who was less confrontational and that they even accepted the position, but he was thwarted by his Cabinet colleagues?

Hon. Mr. Hart: I will reiterate what I have said in the past on several questions on this issues. Mr. Carrel is doing his job as designed by the Municipal Act. He is performing his duties as per the Municipal Act. He is informing the City of Dawson and its councillors to do what they have agreed to do as per the municipal plan, which they have agreed to follow. And that is what he is following them to do. The issues that he is talking about are the ones that are identified in the financial plan and that have financial aspect to the City of Dawson. That is what he is dealing with.

Mr. Cardiff: Well, the minister didn't answer the question, and the question was about whether he had attempted to replace the outside consultant. The minister has painted himself into a corner on this issue, with the help of his Cabinet colleagues, and I'd like to offer them all a way out. Many people in Dawson, including the mayor, would like to see a full public disclosure of this whole situation. One way of doing that would be through an inquiry under the Public Inquiries Act, which would be expensive. So here's another option for the minister and his colleagues. If the municipal council of Dawson City decides to refer this matter to the Ombudsman under section 11.5 of the Ombudsman Act, will the minister give his guarantee today in this House that the hired supervisor from British Columbia will not deny Dawson's council the spending authority to do that?

Hon. Mr. Hart: Mr. Carrel will be doing the duties as outlined under the Municipal Act, and that is what he will be carrying forward.

April 1, 2004

Question re:? Dawson City financial position

Mr. Cardiff: The Dawson City rec centre went over budget, and the minister all but took over the town. The Whitehorse multiplex has gone over budget and the minister is taking out his cheque book. Why the double standard?

Hon. Mr. Hart: The Whitehorse multiplex project is a very valuable project to both the City of Whitehorse and also to us. I think this is an important aspect, and we have to take care of it. We have to create jobs within the community and get moving.

As we speak, they're out there with the survey crew, and they're working on that particular venue.

The City of Dawson has been in this precarious position since way back in 1999, so we're dealing with the City of Dawson through the supervisor.

Mr. Cardiff: The minister just threw more fuel on the fire that the supervisor started. He just inferred that the Dawson City rec complex isn't of value to the government.

As I said the other day, Dawson City residents are angry about their treatment by the government and by the supervisor, whom they consider nothing more than an overpaid supervisor who wants to turn their backyard into a waste management facility.

What's the Premier's role in this? When the Mayor of Whitehorse asked them for help, the Premier came through. A few stormy hours in the corner office and a $4-million deal was done.

Is the Premier willing to invite the Mayor and Council of Dawson City to his office to get this impasse settled once and for all?

Hon. Mr. Hart: We've been working on this issue with the Dawson City mayor and council almost since 2001, trying to help them out of their financial difficulties, and we're continuing to do so. I don't believe that there's anything different we can do.

The issue was brought forward by the previous government in power. They thought it was necessary to appoint a supervisor, and we're following through on that particular issue. We're working on their situation with the town council and the mayor.

Mr. Cardiff: The Member for Klondike is getting his $30-million bridge. Surely the minister can persuade him to let the real mayor and council run Dawson City's affairs. Before the minister goes into his song and dance how the hand-picked supervisor is just doing his job under the Municipal Act, let's repeat the question I asked him the other day: if Dawson council decides to refer this whole issue to the Ombudsman under section 11 of the Ombudsman Act, will the minister let them spend the money to do so?

Hon. Mr. Hart: As I mentioned previously on several occasions, we are working with the City of Dawson and its mayor to try to alleviate their financial situation. They have many problems with their particular aspect. I don't think it's necessary for them to go about looking for other problems.