YTG Supervisor Recommends Removal of Dawson’s Council

by Dan Davidson

Dawson’s financial supervisor, André Carrel, is still in place and has recommended the dissolution of the town’s council following its refusal to obey his instructions in the matter of the awarding of a garbage hauling contract.

Mayor Glen Everitt was astounded to have this confirmed from Minister Glen Hart in a meeting this morning, especially after having been informed repeatedly over the last two weeks by YTG staff that Carrel was being replaced as the supervisor.

Everitt was expecting to learn the name of the new person, who has already accepted the position but has not been identified, this morning. Instead, it was confirmed that Carrel is still on the job.

Carrel was interviewed on CBC radio this morning, leading the morning news with his objections to the garbage contract,, which he characterized as a “Cadillac’’ system. He also said the tender award was in violation of the financial plan which he and the City of Dawson had developed and signed off on in January.

How this can be is unclear since the budget expenditure line for waste management reads $171,400, and the new contract does not go beyond that. Revenues for this service were to have been $111,000 in 2004, but Everitt says they will now be higher due to increases in fees to certain types of commercial establishments which a study has found generate more than the average waste load.

Members of the Chamber of Commerce were in attendance at the March 16 council meeting and spoke in support of both the rate increases and the new waste management plan that s in development by the town.

Chamber president Martin Gehrig proclaimed that his organization was “totally in favour” of the proposed regime.

Carrel, on the other hand, told CBC that he will not allow passage of the fee bylaw which would allow the town to collect the funds needed to pay for the service, and that council’s refusal to obey his orders puts it in violation of the terms of his appointment.

His letter of instruction, dated October 23, 2003 does says that he has the power to “withhold approval of any bylaws respecting the program of the City of Dawson until you are in agreement with such bylaws” although the context of the letter does seem to place this within the framework of drafting a financial plan and the town not exceeding the parameters of that plan.

This is why Mayor Everitt says he and his council are not backing down. He says that Carrel was aware of the request for proposals on the waste management plan when he was in the town in January and expressed no interest in the process or the outcome until after it had been awarded a month later. Everitt says that since it falls within the approved financial plan the city is not in violation and sees this as undue interference in its operations.

He says he was told by Minister Hart that the minister would be seeking an opinion from the justice department as to whether the town has breached the financial plan and if it had the legal authority to issue a request for proposals and award a contract in the manner that it did.

Everitt “relatively happy” with arbitration report, but cannot give details

by Dan Davidson

One might have expected that Dawson’s city council would have been a bit frustrated on Tuesday night. After all, the ruling from arbitrator Chris O’Connor, all 141 pages of it, was sitting right there on the council table, and no one could say a thing about it.

“I’ve been gagged on the ruling,” Everitt told the meeting. “Arbitration law does not permit me to reveal anything in the ruling.”

The exception would be if both sides in the case, the City of Dawson and TSL Contracting, agreed to release an executive summary of the award, leaving out the details and just getting to the conclusions.

Council drafted a resolution at the March 16 meeting instructing the town’s lawyers to seek such an arrangement with TSL’s president, Don Smith.

“Everybody knows,” Everitt said, “that this council made it clear that we want a summary of the award as public information.”

“Am I upset over the ruling?” he asked rhetorically. “No.”

He did say he was surprised by a few of the decisions, but that he was “relatively happy” about the ruling.

Council will not be requesting that the YTG takes steps to replace it with a trustee, which is an indication that the amount of the award was below the magic number of $1.3 million given as the trigger for such an action by the most recent municipal supervisor, André Carrel, when he reported to Minister of Community Services Glen Hart at the end of January.

During Carrel’s public meeting in January and Hart’s in December, 2003, both men speculated that the town could probably lose the arbitration and be stuck with millions of dollars in awards costs. Carrel suggested up to $4 million.

Things do not seem to have gone that way, although the only way to be sure of this will be to check out the spreadsheet of accounts payable sometime down the road and see what the line item reads. Since that is a public document, the arbitrator could not stifle that process.

The other way the ruling might become public is if the award is tabled during the upcoming court case involving the town, the recreation centre’s architects, FSC, and the project engineers. Some of this will involve actions between TSL and FSC and Smith’s company might want to use parts of the award document in making its own case.

Meantime, it would be possible to infer from the satisfied looks on the faces of Everitt, and councillors Joann Van Nostrand, Wayne Potoroka and Bill Holmes, that the exercise has turned out much less badly than the worst case predicted by the government and its agent.

It will, Everitt said, be necessary to rework the 2004 budget and rewrite some of the long term financial plan in order to deal with the repercussions of the ruling, since many deep cuts had been made to Dawson’s spending in order to preserve $1.2 million in order to deal with a possible award.

“The main thing,” commented chamber of council president Martin Gehrig, who was at this meeting, “is that the award is less than $1.3 million.”

“Substantially,” Everitt replied, but would not say more.

In the meantime, the town will be putting forward an argument for recovery of costs in the hearing process, as well as proceeding with legal steps to rectify the faulty roof and other deficiencies in the recreation centre, as well as problems in both the swimming pool and the renovated town hall/fire department building, which were handled by the same architectural firm.

With a positive, or less damaging, outcome to the arbitration, is there still a need for the kind of stringent supervisory oversight that the town has seen since October 2003 under André Carrel? His most recent contract extension (the agreement for payment) expired at the end of February, though the order-in-council which appointed him is still in force.

Council is somewhat divided over that issue. In the past, under Ken Hodgins, the first supervisor, council was happy with his advice and monitoring, as well as the potential for him to be a direct link to the Community Services minister. A similar role would be welcome, in Everitt’s view.

Councillor Wayne Potoroka, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with the word “supervisor”, having seen, he said, how much damage a heavy-handed interpretation of that role can do. He’d be happy to see someone appointed as a municipal advisor.

Carrel had said in January that if the award fell within the amount the council had budgeted for it, that it would not need a supervisor to tell it how to spend any surplus. It remains to be seen how YTG will respond to this situation, but the original intention was to have someone in that role until the plan was fully enacted in the year 2007, which will actually fall outside the mandate of this council and possibly of the Yukon Party government itself.

Everitt will be briefing Minister Glen Hart, who must also swear to keep the results secret, even from his cabinet colleagues, on March 19. Normally, Hart would have no right to the information, but since Dawson is under a supervisor’s oversight at the moment, the arbitrator allowed this exception.