FORT MCMURRAY - Surrounded by pictures of his six children and dozen grandchildren, Dave Kirschner sits in a wheelchair in his room at a continuing care facility in Edmonton. Stricken with a rare, incurable neurological disease, his hands shake as he picks up a folder on the night table beside his bed. His cheerful demeanour turns solemn, his eyes sad as he glances at the document inside. For 36 years, he was one of Fort McMurray’s biggest cheerleaders and trusted servants. Illness caused him to move away and to step down from municipal council shortly before the end of his term last year. In the month before the municipal election, Kirschner wrote to Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths, expressing concerns about disturbing actions and practices within the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo. “To me, the breaches of trust and accountability are serious, insidious and to be clear, are not to be mistaken as complaints from a disgruntled councillor,” he said in the letter, dated Sept. 11. “In fact, I am neither complaining nor disgruntled but rather bringing to your attention a situation which could eventually become a major concern and political embarrassment to all of us.” In response, the minister’s chief of staff, Tim Morrison, thanked Kirschner for his interest, and said the department had no legal authority to investigate. It is a local issue, Kirschner was told, so the matter should be taken up with the municipality’s administration and council, the very people he asked the department to investigate. “I saw this coming,” Kirschner, 60, says now, struggling to speak. His disease — multiple system atrophy — is slowly causing his body to shut down. “I wish they had listened to me.” After moving to Fort McMurray from the Northwest Territories in 1976, Kirschner and his wife, Iris, ran a trucking firm that was once honoured as Alberta’s top small business. They immersed themselves in the community. Over the years, he became chairman of the city development appeal board, a member of the Fort McMurray Planning Commission, a school council chairman, member of the Northern Alberta Development Council and, finally, in 2010, was elected to the municipal council. In three years as a councillor, he never claimed expenses. “He wanted to pay his own way, so he didn’t feel like he owed anybody any favours,” says Iris Kirschner, who lives in an adjoining complex and looks in on her husband of 37 years several times each day. In his letter to the minister, Kirschner expressed concerns that some councillors might have had a pecuniary interest in municipal dealings, including land expropriations related to Fort McMurray’s massive city centre development project, warned that contracts were being tendered without competition, alleged that important decisions were being made at invitation-only Wednesday night meetings presided over by the chief administrative officer, and said councillors were being kept away from meetings with provincial officials. Land-use bylaws were rewritten to accommodate the multibillion-dollar redevelopment project meant to dramatically change the face of Fort McMurray. The plan, devised by Toronto consultant Ron Taylor, calls for expanded public transit, a greater mix of housing and commercial retail opportunities within walking distance of gleaming office towers, and for condominiums to be built along the Snye, a quiet waterway downtown that is beloved by boaters and other recreational enthusiasts. “I have come to understand that we all eventually have the chance to face our choices,” he wrote. “Personally, I made a promise to the citizens of our municipality and to the province to help ensure our municipal house is in order.

“As an elected official I owe it to the 4,900 people who voted for me to help bring truth and closure to this matter in a dignified manner.” Arena, bridge and marina in spotlight Photo: Jon Tupper, former Chamber of Commerce president and a critic of the downtown plan, outside a former motor inn near downtown Fort McMurray.

Just as Dave Kirschner feared, embarrassment has hit Wood Buffalo. In the past month, the municipality’s CAO and a handful of other senior officials have abruptly vacated positions; an accounting firm has been engaged by council to review its policies and senior staff’s expenses; the Canadian Taxpayers Federation has begun clamouring for an investigation into the possible misuse of public funds; and, residents have been outraged by a revelation that $7 million in severance was paid to more than 80 employees dismissed without cause. At the same time, questions are being raised about the viability of the $2-billion city centre project the municipality rolled out in 2011, with debate raging over the construction of a hockey arena and businesses that were expropriated to make room for it, a $76-million pedestrian bridge has been scuttled following an outcry over the expense and a marina project is under siege because it would limit the use of float planes. “My frustration is that our downtown today is in worse shape than it was when we started down this path,” says Jon Tupper, a former president of the Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce who now works for a non-profit organization. “We were over-promised and there was no delivery. “The previous council spent so much time with their head in the clouds that they didn’t put sticks in the ground. When you have delays, opposition grows.” Six of the 10 members of the previous council were replaced in the October election, drastically changing the dynamics and making it more difficult for Wood Buffalo’s longtime mayor, Melissa Blake, to execute a plan essentially formulated by a group of advisers who no longer work for the municipality. “I don’t think in our heads that we would be as opposed to the pay that was given if we received value for the money,” Tupper says. “I don’t see that kind of value.” One waterfront development officer resigned recently. Taylor was found to have billed Wood Buffalo more than $1 million after signing a contract for $150,000, which is part of an audit being conducted for the municipality by KPMG. Another executive expensed $90,000 in flights between 2011 and 2013 and once charged taxpayers $21.50 to add mushrooms and pan-fried onions to a $43 filet at a steak house in Toronto. “They must be magical mushrooms,” says Derek Fildebrandt, president of the Alberta branch of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

Blake, now serving her fourth term as mayor, has been courted as a potential candidate at the provincial and federal levels. She realizes her reputation and political capital is being undermined by the turmoil. “I am not used to this treatment, to people feeling that I have not acted responsibly and been diligent,” she says, seated at a conference table in her seventh-floor office at city hall. “I regret that I didn’t know some things sooner and I take full responsibility for that. “Mistakes were made, and there are certain areas where I think we need better practices, but I don’t believe anything fraudulent was going on.” For the first time in her career, Blake finds herself being assailed on a number of fronts — over the faith she placed in the recently departed city manager, Glen Laubenstein, over housing, living and travel allowances paid to senior staff, and over what she did and did not know about the wave of dismissals and severance payments. “It is the equivalent to Don Iveson saying he didn’t know 1,000 of his employees in Edmonton lost their jobs and were paid $20 million to $30 million in severance,” Fildebrandt says. “I cannot conceive how anyone wouldn’t know that.” Blake says council put its full trust in Laubenstein, whose $533,795 in earnings in 2013 made him the highest-paid city manager in Canada. She says she had long been told the municipality was not paying travel expenses to senior administrators, and maintains she was caught off guard by the largest severance payments. Four of the dismissed employees received more than $300,000, one got $354,467. “The medium and low ends, I got that,” Blake says. “But I was surprised at the higher end. I think we need a cap, and that is one of the things (the accounting firm) is intended to look at.” Blake says a majority of dismissals were handled by human resources officials, department managers and legal staff. “They aren’t things that would be disclosed in any kind of circles,” she says. “I think sometimes you need to be shocked to understand how something came to be.” Sweetheart property deals? Photo: Along the south side of Franklin Ave. between Main Street and Morrison Street in Fort McMurray, lies a stretch of downtown area that is being expropriated to make room for the construction of a hotly contested arena project.

With energy production projected to increase fourfold over the next two decades, Fort McMurray is expected to grow to 196,400 residents by 2030, creating a drastic need for housing and office space. The urban centre in Wood Buffalo, a sprawling municipality that extends 63,000 square kilometres from north-central Alberta to the borders of Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories, Fort McMurray currently claims 72,944 residents, an increase of 71 per cent in the past dozen years. Jammed with oilsands workers and saddled by infrastructure built to accommodate far fewer people, the city has been targeted for a dramatic facelift that includes a downtown core with gleaming skyscrapers, a civic centre, 8,000-seat hockey arena, visual and performing arts centre and hiking and biking trails along a waterfront fashioned after Ottawa’s Rideau Canal. Largely funded by energy companies who contribute more than 90 per cent of the municipality’s tax base of $626 million, the initiative has become bogged down as residents argue over key components, the hasty manner in which the plan was devised and the urgent pace prescribed.

Bids were recently accepted for the arena project. That prompted expropriations that a provincial adjudicator found were executed unfairly and without merit in a non-binding ruling issued last year. Arguments abound over parking and other amenities. Accusations are flying over well-connected citizens receiving sweetheart property deals. Mike Allen, a local MLA and former councillor, acknowledges his music store on the city’s main drag was expropriated for $4.4 million, $3 million more than he paid for it in 2005. The amount he and a business partner received was below fair market value, Allen maintains, adding that he recused himself from discussions related to the matter when he was on council. “It has been a long, long process,” Allen says, seated in his office above his business, which will move into a new space downtown that is being renovated by the municipality. A former restaurant, it also was expropriated for $3.36 million. “Every time I hear we are getting rich off public taxpayers, I want to scream. I have been biting my tongue for the last eight months.” He says he has been unable to defend himself because his expropriation agreement contains a non-disclosure clause. Allen complains his business has suffered as rumours spread about him benefiting inappropriately. “Damage has been done,” he says. “I built my life here ... It is difficult to watch that get destroyed. Many days I wish I could buy the building back. I didn’t want to leave.” Allen says he did not contest the expropriation because he supports the downtown development project, but is concerned it has begun to lose momentum. “We are a community that is growing so rapidly that at some point we need to put a shovel in the ground,” he says. “If we don’t get the development moving, as a resident and business person, I think we are going to kill downtown. “At its heart, the development was going to provide everything that everyone who lives here complains that we don’t have.” Chief administrator salary questioned Photo: Former Fort McMurray CAO Glen Laubenstein during his time with the City of Winnipeg

The chambers were packed May 13 at Wood Buffalo’s council meeting. The evening’s agenda was benign, but tension filled the air. Early on, the mayor joked that she was not going to step down, then a member of council made a motion designed to determine if Blake and other senior administrators knew more about certain issues than they have let on. Keith McGrath, a Newfoundlander who has lived in Fort McMurray for 30 years, requested that the municipality set aside the dismissed employees’ non-disclosure agreements so they can talk to the audit team about their firings. The motion will be debated Tuesday at council’s next meeting. “There is a big human element to this that people forget,” says McGrath, who won a seat on council in October after failing in three previous attempts. “At the end of the day, a lot of people had to go home to their family and say mom or dad doesn’t have a job anymore. “The way they were treated bothers me.”

A few minutes later, Sean Graham, a 22-year-old University of Alberta student asked councillors at the meeting to consider placing a cap of $165,000 on the salary and benefits paid to the chief administrative officer. In the past six years, Wood Buffalo paid $3.4 million to a series of CAOs — an average of more than $577,000 per year. In 2010, it paid more than $939,000 to Laubenstein and two predecessors. “My view is that you want to pay senior administrators well enough so they are making a decent wage, but not to the point where the attraction of the job is to make money,” says Graham, who plans to pursue a postgraduate diploma next year in math. “You want somebody who is invested in the task for the desire to affect the community. “At the end of the day, public servants are there to provide public services. For an entity to pay somebody in that capacity $500,000 doesn’t seem appropriate.” Council’s reaction to Graham was lukewarm but they should not expect him to go away easily. At age 16, Graham requested that the municipality ban single-use plastic bags and eventually pestered administrators so much they drafted legislation that was adopted in December of 2011. “I am proud of that but I hope that’s not my legacy,” Graham says. “I hope to do something more significant than that.” History project nets surprise cheque Photo: Francis Jean is 82 and has owned and operated the City Centre Car Wash downtown for most of her life. Jean is annoyed about a number of things related to the downtown development project.

Frances Jean, 82, works seven days a week at the City Centre Car Wash in Fort McMurray, taking only breaks for lunch and a nap on weekdays, and to attend church services and bake bread on Sundays. A peppery grandmother who looks 20 years younger, she came from the Okanagan Valley in 1967 at a time when there were 1,500 people living in Fort McMurray. A historian and author who ran a retail store and operated a newspaper with her late husband, she laments the direction the municipality has taken in recent years and shares many of the same concerns as Dave Kirschner. Jean, a vocal opponent of the city centre redevelopment plan, says she was volunteering for a local heritage board when she was approached by project consultant Ron Taylor and asked to prepare a history of specific buildings in Fort McMurray. “He said he would pay me, but I told him I didn’t need the money,” Jean says. “It is my love, and when you are as old as I am there is nothing you can do with money but travel.” Jean says after she had completed the project, a staff member from the municipality’s planning department handed her a $5,000 cheque. “I hadn’t done anything for it and I never invoiced them,” she says. Uncomfortable about receiving the honorarium, Jean says she then called her son, the since-retired MP Brian Jean. She told him she intended to return the cheque, but he advised her to make a copy and deposit it into an account belonging to one of the many charitable organizations for whom she volunteers.

After disclosing that she had been given a cheque, Frances Jean says municipal officials initially denied it. When she produced a copy of the cheque, a municipal administrator said he was simply trying to channel money into the heritage project upon which she had been working. “I can’t tell you with 100-per-cent certainty what the purpose was for giving me that cheque,” Frances Jean says. “But to me, it didn’t smell right. “My question is, if they were giving me a $5,000 cheque with no services provided, who else were they giving money to? “It was written out to me. I could have taken it to the casino here and cashed it. It was unbelievable.” New city boss promises open dialogue Photo: The new chief administrative officer of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, Marcel Ulliac, is looking into Fort McMurray’s downtown construction plan.

Marcel Ulliac, employed by Wood Buffalo for nearly three decades, was elevated to interim chief administrative officer following Laubenstein’s departure. A former farm boy who grew up in Plamondon, he has spent 32 years in public administration, most recently as the municipality’s director of land administration. Ulliac said his management style will differ from Laubenstein, whose unorthodox approach included Wednesday night meetings with select business leaders. Women were not allowed to attend. “He invited me once and I wouldn’t go,” says Brian Jean, who resigned as Fort McMurray-Athabasca MP in January after serving 10 years in Ottawa. “Any group that doesn’t want input from 51 per cent of the intellect on the planet is not worth belonging to.” Ulliac says he is reaching out to other administrators and understands the importance of public engagement. “I live by the golden rule of no surprises,” he says. “I think it is the only way to conduct business. You need to communicate with people openly and in a timely fashion. “The city centre catalyst projects are being sorted through, and I think a strong message has been delivered about the will and the want to evaluate and make sure the public has input.” Some of the more vocal opponents of the redevelopment project complain it was put together too quickly and without great thought. Rather than place an arena downtown, some detractors say a better venue would be the site of the Penhorwood condominium complex, where 300 tenants and owners were forced from their homes in 2011 due to structural deficiencies. The cluster of unoccupied seven buildings has fallen victim to vagrants and vandals even as mortgages are still being paid. “It would have helped people and it has better highway access,” Jon Tupper says. “It made too much sense.” Chuckling, Jean says the city centre redevelopment is just the latest in a lengthy list of major projects to somehow go awry. In the 1970s, a consultant once proposed putting a dome over Fort McMurray, other plans were submitted in 1997, 2001 and 2007. “History keeps repeating itself,” Tupper says. “We go through engagement exercises and then can’t execute the plan.