HALIFAX, NS – Mayor Peter Kelly says he’s confident Halifax has nothing to fear from federal auditors looking into how the city spent transportation funds from Ottawa.
A Transport Canada audit has raised concerns about claims made by officials in Halifax, Winnipeg and Vancouver for projects designed to cut greenhouse gases, The Canadian Press reported this week. About $5 million was reimbursed without any supporting documents to show how the money was spent.
"I would presume that if we had funds for a specific purpose that we would expend it appropriately," Kelly said Monday. "I don’t think there’s any reason why it would not go as expected."
Halifax’s MetroLink bus rapid transit project received a portion of its $12.3-million cost through the Urban Transportation Showcase Program, which wrapped up in March 2009. The project included rapid bus service to downtown from outlying areas.
The federal money was supposed to go toward making public transit more energy efficient.
"The bulk of that was paid for by HRM so I would think that the funds were used where they were meant to go," Kelly said.
Auditors were critical of Transport Canada’s lax rules on administering the money, including failing to require competitive bidding on city-issued contracts in an attempt to get the best value for taxpayers’ dollars.
The department also failed to ensure that the projects getting federal funding had followed the conditions required. Other cities that received funding but apparently aren’t being probed are Whitehorse; Toronto, Hamilton and Waterloo in Ontario; and Quebec City, Montreal and Gatineau in Quebec.
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