Councillor Doug Ford and a fellow fiscal conservative clashed Tuesday over the salaries of executives at Build Toronto, Toronto’s city-owned real estate company.

Lorne Braithwaite, Build’s CEO, was paid $453,000 in 2010, including a bonus of $153,000. A senior vice-president, Don Logie, made $318,000, including a bonus of $106,000.

Build Toronto does not get direct handouts from taxpayers, but pays its employees with the money it makes selling or developing surplus public land.

The company was launched in 2009; 2010 was its first full year of operation. It returned a $20 million dividend to city coffers in 2011, and its chair, Oxford Properties Group CEO Blake Hutcheson, says it expects to provide $70 million this year.

Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, the Build critic whose successful council motion forced the company to disclose the salaries, called the bonuses exorbitant. But Ford, Build’s vice-chair, strongly defended them.

Braithwaite is the former CEO of Cambridge Shopping Centres, a giant. Ford said he is “one of the top people in real estate in the country,” that Build is “four years ahead of schedule,” and that Braithwaite skillfully spearheaded a joint venture, finalized in 2011, to develop a 75-storey condo on a complicated property on York St.

“You can get a guy half-assed and pay him 100 grand a year, and the Tridel deal — the average guy would have sold that property for $5 million. When you bring Lorne Braithwaite in, he turned that $5 million into $40 million for the city. That’s the difference between a good guy and a half-assed guy,” Ford said.

Minnan-Wong said Build’s work is not exceptionally complicated: “By and large, they’re selling land for residential redevelopment. That’s hardly a difficult job in this market.” And he said its executives should not have made salaries “far in excess of any of the senior management at City Hall” for a year in which they closed only one deal.

“Something is terribly, terribly wrong when Build Toronto pays out massive bonuses and all they can show for the year is one transaction,” he said.

Hutcheson said Minnan-Wong does not understand that major real estate transactions usually take 12 to 20 months to complete. Build has now done eight deals.

Hutcheson refused to say specifically what targets Braithwaite had met to earn the extra $153,000 under Build’s incentive program. He said, however, that Braithwaite has excelled, and that Build executives are being paid less than the majority of their peers at comparable companies.

The CEO of Invest Toronto, a city agency set up to help attract foreign investors, earned $292,000, including a $15,000 bonus. The CEO of the Toronto Port Lands Company, which manages and leases large city-owned tracts of the Port Lands, made $206,000, including a $34,000 bonus.

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