LORINC: There’s a New Acronym in Town

If you haven’t already done so, best begin memorizing the sequence “T-T-I-L,” because those four little letters are going to start taking up a whole lot of political mindshare in coming years.

The acronym stands for Toronto Transit Infrastructure Limited, a subsidiary of the Toronto Transit Commission and the corporate vehicle that will become the headquarters for Mayor Rob Ford’s private subway scheme.

All we know so far about TTIL is that it was the TTC’s dormant consulting arm and has been re-purposed as a board-within-a-board. The directors are Norm Kelly, corporate secretary Vince Rodo, counsel Brian Leck and Gordon Chong, the long-time Metro councilor and former GO Transit chair who worked on Ford’s transition team. Doug Ford, as usual, is lurking in the background, calling the shots.

Chong is the president and CEO, and his assignment is to work up a business case for the subway scheme, to present to the federal government in June. As I reported in The Globe last week, he expects to spend about half a million dollars on economic, planning and environmental studies in order to prepare the application, but doesn’t expect to make any of this public before shipping it off to Ottawa.

The nature of the relationship between TTIL and the citizens of Toronto has yet to be determined, of course, but it’s worth quoting the following paragraph from the report that came to the commission last week [ PDF ]:

“Given that TTIL is a subsidiary corporation of the TTC, and its recent mandate to provide assistance and advice to the TTC in a specific, limited area, subject to certain conditions and restrictions, staff recommend that TTIL be requested to develop policies relating to procurement and financial authorizations and a by-law to govern proceedings consistent with those of the Commission. [Emphasis added]”

Note that this entreaty is a staff recommendation, not yet policy. But the implication is clear: that TTIL should follow established TTC rules and should do as much of its business in public as the commission does. We’ll see, but I’m not holding my breath.

Let’s get the pedantic respect-for-taxpayers stuff out of the way first: Chong will be commissioning a bunch of expert studies to support the business case. But given the mayor’s incessant harping about sole-sourcing, I would expect that Chong will have to issue RFPs and evaluate the consultants according to pre-established criteria rather than simply hiring cronies who will deliver the conclusions the mayor wants to hear.

Takes too long? Too bureaucratic? Sorry, those excuses don’t wash anymore.

Chong, to his credit, allows for the possibility that the experts may determine that a privatized Sheppard subway may not be feasible, although he insists that this conclusion is not probable. Given that the mayor’s team is looking for back-up singers to support a foregone conclusion, the integrity of the expert advice is that much more important. Torontonians should be able to guage the distance between these dispassionate evaluations and the political decisions that flow from them.

Which leads me to the intriguing question of how much we’re going to find out about this business case. According to Chong, not much.

But the details are nothing if not the public’s business. The architecture of a private subway deal that could include a very long-running contract will include a whole set of metrics that directly involve residents and taxpayers:

• density requirements along the corridor;

• estimates on the revenues that could be expected from development charges and tax increment financing schemes, as well as other streams, such as air rights near the stations and advertising;

• economic assumptions relating to land use development and job growth over the next 50-to-100 years(a biggy);

• various contractual models governing the commercial relationship between the consortia and the TTC, including projections about operating fees, maintenance/repair obligations, and labour costs;

• liability assumptions, such as who pays in the event of an accident on the new line, or what happens if the consortia at some point defaults on its loans.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have these studies made public so Torontonians could evaluate the evaluators well in advance of a council debate? Indeed, Section 7.1.2 (f) of the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act states that public requests for “a feasibility study or other technical study, including a cost estimate, relating to a policy or project of an institution” should not refused.

Chong, of course, is aiming to get all this done very quickly without the inconvenient involvement of the public, so I’m guessing TTIL will be releasing very little of its work as it races to prepare its application to the federal government.

At the minimum, however, he should have the expert studies that support the TTIL’s application peer-reviewed before putting it in the mail. After all, if the mayor’s scheme is as self-evidently attractive to private investors as he claims, it could surely endure the scrutiny.

photo by Jacklyn Atlas