Vancouver city councillor and mayoral candidate Peter Ladner revealed more Friday about city council's decision to lend up to $100 million to the troubled developer of the Olympic Athletes Village. Sources, who asked not to be publicly identified, told CBC News on Thursday that the council had made the decision to approve the loan earlier in October, but city council refused to officially confirm the information. Ladner also refused to talk directly about the loan on Friday, saying the decision was made in a closed-door meeting. However, he did provide a new detail — that the decision was unanimous.
"These are very high-level, difficult, legal-commercial negotiations," Ladner, who is also chair of the city's finance committee, told CBC News. "It's completely irresponsible and ridiculous to think that we could do all this in public and still protect the taxpayer." The loan was issued after it was revealed the developer, Millennium Development Corp., was facing about $60 million in cost overruns on the construction of the Olympic Athletes Village for the 2010 Winter Games. The loan came from the city's property endowment fund.
Ladner argued negotiations regarding the loan are no different than private real estate deals. "Why would the Olympics be different? The scope is bigger but the framework of the deal is the same. The city does this stuff all the time — it has done this for years." Geoff Meggs, who is not currently on council but is running as a Vision Vancouver candidate in the Nov. 15 municipal election, is not bound by issues of confidentiality. He says he believes some councillors may have been misled. "The fact that it was unanimous raises the question of whether the councillors were properly informed by Peter Ladner and Sam Sullivan." There are currently unconfirmed reports the city's chief financial officer, Estelle Low, resigned this week after fallout about the loan. When asked to confirm the resignation, Meggs would only say she was "missing in action."
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