Amendment: Staff Report-Back on Land Sales Audit

Thanks, Chair. This is a really important discussion, and I appreciated what I heard from both sides. What I took away from the—I'm just going to provide some context for the amendment that I'm proposing. What I took away from the audit was not necessarily that the city had left money on the table, but it couldn't demonstrate that it had not. And there was an opportunity with the sort of obvious specific exception discussion around beach with a genuine calculation error, et cetera. But I think what this pointed out to me is that when you have reference to some policies from 1978, 1980, 81, our world is very complex now with respects to land sales transactions and negotiations and the intersection between those policies and community contributions. And what I from that is that we have an opportunity to clarify procedures and consolidate and documentation I also heard some agreement from our staff I heard first of all I heard an acknowledgment these are very complex transactions from our staff I heard a lot of passion around the process there is a great deal of moving parts in these projects there's a lot of work that goes into sort of landing Project for the city and a good deal and trying to keep projects moving in economic times. I'm having said that I also heard that there was some agreement with the recommendations Some that there weren't and some opportunities to potentially strengthen them So I'm acknowledging all of that I think it would be helpful for the committee to add a further clause the recommendations that reads further that the Auditor General Committee recommend to counsel that counsel direct staff to report back in response to the findings of the audit and with their proposed response, including but not limited to updated, consolidated, clarified, and modernized procedures related to land sales and exchanges, considerations for information provided to council related to land transactions, potential annual reporting related to land sales, including sales value and related community value and benefits received, and any further updates or improvements that staff themselves might recommend. And so that's an additional consideration as a further clause for the committee. To consider, it will be ultimately council that can direct staff, but the committee can provide recommendations.

Please go ahead. Thanks, Chair, and thanks, Councillor Kirby-Young. I very much appreciate this amendment as... recognizing what is a complex situation, but I think that there is clearly some information exchange that needs to be better facilitated in allowing staff to respond to some of this and their concerns around the nature of the findings. So I think by appropriately directing or recommending to council that council direct staff to report back with their findings on the audit. And their proposed response to the recommendations, I think, is helpful and actually moves this forward in a positive way. And while respecting the tenor of the findings from the AGO, which is indeed that there needs to be more clarity in this process, and I think that's what we all recognize and agree on. And so how we get there, I think this is the right path forward. So thank you for that amendment.