Monday, April 2nd, 2007 ::: "Street Furniture"

In a remarkable reversal of roles, we have discovered that the City of Toronto lied to advertising companies by knowingly filing materially false information in official “street furniture” RFP bid documents in order to cover-up the bypassing of established Purchasing policy.

Bureaucrats love process. But not these bureaucrats. And now the City’s Director of Purchasing, Lou Pagano, is wishing Transportation Services stuck to his rulebook because if this RFP goes forward, he’ll have a whole lot of explaining to do.

And we can pretty much guarantee you that no matter what happens with “street furniture” this City’s going to get its pants sued off faster than you can say “Union Station.”

Last week, we questioned certain conflict of interest issues surrounding the “street furniture” RFP. Today we take a look at another aspect of how the bureaucracy botched the process. We will show you how Mr. Pagano’s rulebook was thrown out the window; and how, the City tried to cover it up with lies.

It turns out that a decision made by Purchasing in February 2006, to prohibit certain designers from participating in the RFP if they attended a pre-RFP closed-door Design Exchange charrette was selectively enforced by Transportation Services.

We don’t know why Transportation Services was keen on overriding the Purchasing Department’s decision. We do know that there was one designer at that closed-door session whose presence later caused hackles to be raised by other bidders, a designer that Transportation Services seems to have a liking to.

A certain Jerry Kramer.

Astral Media’s million-dollar man.

Let’s take a look at what happened.

Via this epic FOI request, we discovered that in February 2006, the Purchasing Department ruled that anybody who participates in the closed-door session would be prohibited from working for a bidder on the RFP.

Here is an e-mail dated February 12, 2006, from the Director of the “Street Furniture” project, Bob Millward, confirming just that:

The City then proceeded to selectively enforce Purchasing’s decision by making a series of ad-hoc decisions as to who could attend the DX process. In particular, they allowed Astral Media to attend the DX process and participate in the RFP, but they refused the same accommodation to JCDecaux and other companies.

Bidders in the RFP other than Kramer/Astral Media had some very serious concerns about the decision not to exclude participants in the closed-door session, because they themselves were excluded (although they were oblivious, until now, that Purchasing decided to exclude attendees officially). Take a look at Question 77 in Addendum 2:

What we have here is the overriding of a decision made by the Purchasing Department, an override that bidders found to be prejudicial to their rights.

Now look a the answer to Question 77 that the City provided to bidders:

“No tactical advantage,” eh?

Bullshit. In truth, Answer 77 is subterfuge designed to countermand the discovery of the City’s failure to follow its own purchasing policies. We have uncovered a series of e-mails that shows Answer 77 is a lie that the City knew was a lie.

Here it is, it is top-posted so start from the bottom:

This was a response to an e-mail from Robert Blunt of Goodman & Carr, requesting permission for his client, JCDecaux, to attend the DX charrette.

Mr. Millward says JCDecaux’s presence would be “seen as an unfair advantage.”

Then Mr. Millward says he agrees “with David,” meaning David Nagler who writes: “the individual.. should not be invited to the charettes [sic] because he works for JCDecaux and it would create an unlevel playing field for other potential suppliers.”

Then Mr. Millward states that “we want to avoid staff from the bid companies, especially if they are identifiable.” Yet what of Mr. Kramer’s attendance at the DX - Mr. Kramer, a very high profile personality, a highly identifiable individual, who was, after all, under a million-dollar retainer to Astral at the time?

How exactly will Purchasing’s Mr. Pagano explain this? How exactly will he explain deciding, in February 2006, that anybody who attends the charrette “will not be able to sign on with one of the companies bidding on the RFP;” then allowing Mr. Kramer to attend the charrette while being signed on with Astral? How will he explain barring JCDecaux from attending the charrette because “it would create an unlevel playing field for other potential suppliers” and then telling bidders in Answer 77 of Addendum 2 that attendance at the charrette provided bidders “with no tactical advantage.” How will he explain knowingly providing materially false information to bidders in Answer 77 of Addendum 2?

Imagine the tangled web the City is going to have to weave to explain this.

The ball is in Mr. Pagano’s court. This RFP goes nowhere unless Mr. Pagano is willing to put his name on the Staff Report. Is Lou Pagano willing risk everything and certify that this process complied with his department’s rules? And furthermore, aren’t we just scratching the surface of the rot in this RFP?

No wonder the City Clerk banned us from filing Freedom of Information requests, eh? What else does the City not want us to know?

Clear Channel Outdoor, by the way, was also concerned with Kramer’s participation at the charrette. Clear Channel calls it “problematic” in the second last paragraph of this e-mail that Clear Channel sent to IllegalSigns.ca.

We think we know what’s going on here. It’s pretty clear: City staffers have set this thing up for Astral Media to win.

Even if the DX process did nothing to inform the City as to the design direction it wanted (designers and other activists are claiming just that), we suggest the City didn’t want JCDecaux at the charrette because the City wanted to psychologically alienate JCDecaux, and anybody who wasn’t Astral Media, from the entire process. The City wanted to send a message to JCDecaux: you’re not welcome here. And that’s exactly what happened. That explains Question 77 and that explains why Cemusa and JCDecaux, the largest providers of “street furniture” in the world, dropped out of the bidding.

And while the DX process may have contributed little to the City’s design direction, we suggest that Mr. Kramer provided much of that direction nonetheless. In fact, Mr. Kramer has influenced City staff to such an extent that the RFP’s specifications for info-pillars are virtually identical to Kramer/Astral’s “Info Must-Go” pillars, which Mr. Kramer designed in the confines of his ridiculous Dupont Street office. Here are the required specifications in the RFP for information kiosks: “The structures should have a coin operated map dispenser and incorporate audio technology and scrolling LED screens.” The only “street furniture” product in the world that matches that description just happens to be Mr. Kramer’s Info Must-Go. Coincidence? We don’t think so.

And, of course, Astral Media’s proposed info-kiosks are identical to their existing Kramer product. In other words, Astral Media is the only bidder that didn’t have to design a new info-pillar product, putting Astral an easy seven figures ahead of the competition right off the bat.

This, despite the fact that none of the audio technology in the Astral pillars that we encountered actually works; this, despite the fact that nobody has ever had a good word to say about Astral’s pillars. Actually, that’s not entirely true. At the North York public consultation one man spoke about how much he loved Astral’s pillars. He went on and on about how cool the pillars are. Seconds later, that man was outed as an Astral Media employee by two very sharp Toronto Public Space Committee volunteers (at which point he professed, to laughter, that he loved the pillars before he worked for Astral).

What we have here folks is a Class A purchasing screw-up. What we have here is an RFP so irredeemably tainted that, if Purchasing doesn’t trash it, Purchasing going to have hell to pay.

Can a Purchasing Department lie to bidders and get away with it?

In fact Answer 77 is part and parcel of a whole pack of lies that the bureaucracy has been selling to the public and to City Council since this process began. It started with the lie that “street furniture” coordination would result in an overall reduction in advertising on the road allowance and continues with the lie that we can improve out streetscapes by selling their ownership and outsourcing their care to the very same lawless multi-national advertising corporations that routinely defy the very same laws our City Council has passed to protect those streetscapes. Perhaps staff got so used to telling lies they couldn’t stop when an advertising company came around, in Question 77, asking for the truth. Consider the poetic irony of our pathetic bureaucracy.
Transportation Service’s decision to hire Mr. Kramer to design the City’s new street signs also raised hackles among bidders after veteran Transportation staffer Roberto Stopnicki told the National Post that the new signs were designed to fit in with the City’s “newly designed street furniture.” See Question 23 in Addendum 1 and Question 76 in Addendum 2. At least somebody at Transportation Services tells the truth.

Transportation Services staff went ballistic over this Mike Smith NOW Magazine article. They then drafted this letter to the editor that the City’s FOI office found to be too sensitive to disclose to IllegalSigns.ca, with one bureaucrat saying of the letter: “Communications always say that you shouldn’t respond this way.” NOW did not publish any letter from the City. For the record, the City is welcome to leave a comment on this blog if it finds anything similarly “out of context”.

Can the City explain why Addendum 2 is not located anywhere on the City’s web site? Why it is that IllegalSigns.ca was only able to access this information and discover the purchasing screw-up via Joe Clark’s private website?

A good critique of the Kramer/Astral Info-Must-Go pillars, installed on parkland paved for their construction, is available here.