Seven months into his term, Mayor Rob Ford summoned the media to a city hall press conference above the council chamber. There, in a prepared speech, he announced that he was appointing Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti to lead a group of task forces on his behalf.

Ford himself outlined a mayor’s task force on child care. He then turned the mic over to Mammoliti, a controversial and eccentric conservative, who said he would also be chairing a mayor’s task force on homelessness.

Which was never created.

The homelessness task force, like a third task force on how to pay for arenas and other new infrastructure, was not actually formed. More than two years later, Ford still has no plans to follow through on the announcement.

“I think it’s really a shame if it was just dropped,” says street nurse Anne Marie Batten.

Reports produced by task forces regularly vanish into the bureaucratic abyss — but the task forces themselves do not usually turn to dust before they are even formed. How, exactly, does a supposed mayoral initiative on an important subject disappear immediately after it is introduced?

Emails obtained through a freedom-of-information request suggest Ford and Mammoliti didn’t have a plan for the task force on homelessness even when they announced it — and that Ford, who has demonstrated little interest in social policy, had reservations about his own supposed initiative in the first place.

Four days before the press conference, on a Friday at 6:45 p.m., Jackie DeSouza, the city’s director of strategic communications, emailed a plea to Ford’s then-press secretary, Adrienne Batra.

“Can you please provide some background information on what exactly is being announced?” DeSouza wrote.

“Happy to help but the announcement is Tuesday and we’re being asked to create communications materials from thin air. Help!”

Earlier that day, Mammoliti assistant Tamara Macgregor offered only generalities to another city communications official.

“Because the parameters are still pretty vague for Ice Rink and Homeless Task Forces are still in the process of being thought out (sic), we can focus on the child care one,” Macgregor wrote. “Homelessness task force will look at getting people off of the street and ensuring their safety.”

A cryptic email to Batra from a third communications official, David Clark, suggests Ford deliberately decided to stay silent on the homelessness task force at the press conference.

“I gave the mayor a few short remarks on only the Childcare Development task force, because if we only mention two (childcare and ice rinks), the question will then be: why no mention of the homelessness task force? This way, Mayor Ford ‘chooses’ to only speak to one, leaving the rest to the councillor,” Clark wrote the day before the announcement.

Ford, a dollars-and-cents conservative populist, has never made homelessness a political priority. Earlier this year, he said the shelter system was “working great”; as a councillor in 2002, in response to a proposal to allow homeless shelters around the city, he said, “This is an insult to my constituents to even think about having a homeless shelter in their ward.”

Mammoliti, who believes transitional housing should replace homeless shelters, says Ford was on board with the task force at the time of the announcement. Ford’s staffers, he says, were responsible for the mayor’s eventual decision not to proceed.

In an interview in June, Mammoliti singled out Mark Towhey, Ford’s policy adviser in 2011 and later his chief of staff. In a second interview Thursday, Mammoliti made similar comments without using Towhey’s name.

“There was a former member of the staff that did not want anything to do with homelessness and was advising the mayor not to move forward with it, because he didn’t believe in transitional housing. He didn’t believe in spending money; they just wanted us to go bash heads on the curbs,” Mammoliti says. “This individual did not agree with my approach.”

Towhey declined to comment. Ford’s spokesmen did not respond to emails.

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Mammoliti was the Ford-appointed chair of the community development committee at the time of the press conference in July 2011. In August 2011, one of his assistants emailed Batra and Towhey to propose a meeting about the task force. She got no written response.

When contacted by the Star in July 2012, after the child care task force produced its report, Mammoliti said he had just begun work on the homelessness task force — and then immediately made inflammatory remarks, saying that people who don’t agree with his own views on the subject were not welcome on the panel, that the homeless should be forced off the street against their will, and that city shelters should be eventually shut down. He was not quoted again about the task force after that month.

Batten says the mayor’s abandonment of the project sends the message that “homelessness isn’t important.” A Ford task force, she says, could have attracted needed attention to the issue and brought policymakers into contact with front-line workers, agency leaders and homeless people themselves — “the voices we really need to listen to.”