Joel Goldenberg – The Suburban LJI Reporter
The previous Hampstead administration under Mayor William Steinberg rushed the initial process for the town’s redone tennis court, Mayor Jeremy Levi told a resident at the Dec. 4 council meeting.
Earlier this year, when asked why the cost of the court increased from $1.3 million to $3 million, Levi, who did not refer to his predecessor by name, said he did not know what took place with the process before he became Mayor. At the December meeting, he had more information.
“It’s important you have context to this,” the Mayor said. “The way that tennis turned out with the new construction, nobody’s happy about it, full stop. There was an initial contract that was issued, and that was issued under a previous mandate, it wasn’t when I was Mayor. The Mayor at the time rushed through a contract. The procedures to create the bid document were not done properly. There were a lot of missing parts that needed to be formulated, and by missing some information, there was a company that was selected that really should never have submitted a bid to begin with, because they were not qualified.”
Levi added that after the election took place in which he became Mayor, “they demolished the existing tennis court and there was nothing to do. The company didn’t show up to work, to carry out the construction of the tennis courts, it was a very big problem.
“We tried many different ways to force them to finish, we had three choices. One was to do nothing, leave it as is and the entire town would be without the tennis courts. Two, we could take legal action, pursuing the warranties and it could drag on in court and cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to enforce the contract, and years would go by until we had tennis courts. Or three, we could go back to the drawing board and renegotiate with the existing company to buy the product we already secured and hire somebody else to do it. None of those options were great, but those were the cards we were dealt. That’s what we inherited from a previous mandate.”
Levi added that if it was known what the cost of the redone court would eventually be, “I guarantee you there wouldn’t have been anyone on this side of the table [council] that would have been in favour of demolishing the court to begin with.
“But because there was a rush on the initial contract to get the contract out and redo the courts, certain things were missed. And although the courts cost a significant amount more than what we anticipated, we have been able to significantly increase the fees and I think we collected about $150,000 of revenue just from the tennis courts. So based on that, in a 10-year period, we’re going to recover maybe 80 percent of the costs of this expenditure.”
Councillor Harvey Shaffer, a lawyer by profession, agreed that if the legal case route was pursued, “the likelihood would have been that we would not have had any tennis for our residents for several years.”
When the resident later pointed out that the current council is mostly made up of the same people as the previous council, he was told they did not have the same information then that they have now.
Steinberg replied to The Suburban that “first, we were not rushed and five of the six members of the current council voted for the contract on the advice of consultants and management.
“The vote was unanimous. The problem was that the company hired did not fulfill the terms of the contract. The new council did not sue the company hired and instead paid them off for cancelling the contract. I can’t imagine why they did that. Then they paid far too much for the new company and in total, with the payoff, the cost more than doubled from what my council wanted to pay.”