With just over a year left in Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti’s four-year term, he charged taxpayers $25,000 to renovate an old classroom he now uses as his constituency office.

Mammoliti moved into the modest 1,090-square-foot office in September. It is located on the second floor of the city-owned Carmine Stefano Community Centre, a facility Mammoliti made temporarily famous in October when he publicized a photo of an employee he alleged to be sleeping on the job.

The renovations are entirely legal under a little-known city policy passed last year over the opposition of Mayor Rob Ford. They are also unusual.

No other councillor this term has billed taxpayers for nearly so large an amount for work on a constituency office. The next-biggest 2013 constituency bill is Councillor Ron Moeser’s $13,715, mostly rent, and only four councillors including Mammoliti have exceeded $10,000, according to the city website.

Ford campaigned on a promise to reduce councillors' general office budgets to $30,000 from $50,445. He fulfilled the pledge at the first meeting of his term in 2010.

But in a 2012 decision that attracted almost no attention, councillors approved a policy that allowed them to spend as much as $146,700 over four years to open and run an office in their ward — over and above the general budget, which now sits at $30,450 per year.

The $146,700 includes: $25,000 for renovations, $18,000 per year for rent, $5,000 per year for phone and Internet bills, $1,500 for moving, $17,000 for furniture and equipment, $6,200 for various fees, and $5,000 for “decommissioning” the office.

Every councillor is given an office at city hall. But many of the councillors who represent suburban wards say they need a constituency office to serve seniors and other residents who find it difficult to make the trip downtown.

For most of the term, Mammoliti (Ward 7, York West) rented Wilson Ave. office space from the Emery Village Business Improvement Area. He expensed $254 per month in rent.

In an interview, Mammoliti said he decided to leave the BIA office because his transit-dependent constituents complained it was hard to reach by bus and because people questioned his relationship with the BIA.

He wanted to return to his old office in the community centre, he said, but city officials told him that room had already been rented to somebody else. The city then offered to create a new office for him down the hall, he said, and take care of all the necessary renovations.

“The clerk’s office are the ones that suggested that they prepare this office for me. And I basically said, as long as it’s not breaking any policies or any of that stuff, I’m OK with it,” Mammoliti said. “They said it’s not, and they said they’d cover the costs of preparing it. And I said OK.”

City spokesperson Wynna Brown challenged this account. Brown said “the councillor made a request to the clerk's office for a constituency office at 3100 Weston Rd.,” the address of the community centre.

The not-yet-public renovation receipts, provided by the city when the Star inquired, total $25,666 before tax. They include: $378 for a building permit; $3,780 for a “site investigation” by a contractor; $1,575 to the contractor for work related to permit documents; $8,849 to a second contractor for electrical work; $11,084 to a third contractor to build walls; $3,555 a fourth contractor for four air conditioning units.

The rent for the office is $1,499 per month, Brown said. Taxpayers are also responsible for this expense.

Mammoliti is a fiscal conservative. He would not say directly whether he has any regrets about the renovation bill. Aformer union leader who now takes regular shots at organized labour, he responded to the question with a claim that the total could have been cut in half if the city did not have to pay union wages for the work.

Asked why he could not have simply found a move-in-ready office rather than charge taxpayers for thousands in renovations, Mammoliti said, “I wanted my old office back. And that’s what I would have preferred and that’s what I’d asked for.”

“So do you continue with a lease that people are objecting to, in a private location, in a business building?” he said. “And that was an issue: people were saying ‘you should be in a community centre, you shouldn’t have taxpayers’ dollars being spent on a private location.’ You try and accommodate everybody, and you can’t please everybody.”

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The Star visited the new office, located at Weston Rd. and Sheppard Ave. W, on Monday. Two of Mammoliti’s aides were working there as he attended a council meeting at city hall.

The office has been subdivided into three areas. A school blackboard remains on one of the walls. The councillor has decorated other walls with framed copies of newspaper stories about him. Nothing fancy is visible from the reception area.

Brown said the room had been empty for “several years.” If it becomes vacant in its new form, she said, the city can use it for community centre programs or rent it out to community groups.

Mammoliti, who has had personal financial difficulties, has been embroiled in four money-related controversies this term. He is facing Municipal Elections Act charges for allegedly improper campaign spending and an integrity commissioner investigation over a $5,000-a-table mid-term fundraiser. He was criticized for taking a $200,000 loan from a company affiliated with a developer he had assisted at council, and for allegedly receiving below-market rent from another developer that does business with the city.