According to the bidding rules for the downtown deal, unless land was already owned by the city, bidders were to acquire property for their proposals on their own.

The lawsuit has probed whether or not the First Choice property was secured when council was told that it had been and who actually paid to secure the land.

According to a transcript of a March 2011 council meeting filed with the court, councillors were told by senior staff that the developer had secured the First Choice property. Later at that meeting, council approved the selection of Dominus as the winning bidder.

The payment to secure the property wasn’t made until later. In October 2011 Fennell signed the “nominee agreement” that described the city’s payment to Dominus so it could secure an option on the First Choice land.

The agreement, signed by Fennell and Dominus president Joseph Cordiano, states that the “City has paid, or will cause to be paid, the Option Fee.” An attachment to the agreement, “Schedule A,” specifies that the price of the option fee is $480,000.

Years later as part of the lawsuit’s discovery process, where each side is allowed to seek information from the other to help its case, Fennell was asked if she knew that it was the city that had paid Dominus $480,000 to secure the parcel of land it needed to build a downtown library, and if so, when did she learn that.

According to her written response, filed with the court, Fennell said that in 2014 city staff presented a report to council about the property and the cost of the option for it.

“Therefore, the former Mayor knew at the same time as her colleagues on Council,” the response says.

In an email to the Star and Guardian, Fennell’s lawyer, David Shiller, said “there is no inconsistency” between the 2011 agreement she signed and her response to the court, that she learned of the payment in 2014.

“The documents for the (downtown) development were voluminous, and the mayor recalls it took at least 2-3 hours to sign all of them. The nominee agreement was likely one of the documents,” Shiller said.

Shiller said that Fennell “does not recall reviewing” the content of the agreement.

“Ms Fennell does not recall knowing, at the time she signed the nominee agreement, that the City had paid the option fee,” he wrote.

The lawsuit has also examined whether or not council was kept in the dark about the $480,000 payment.

In 2014 during the pretrial discovery process, former senior Brampton staffer Julian Patteson, who was dismissed by the city last month in a restructuring of management, said councillors were never told about the $480,000 payment.

In a line of questioning the lawyer for the plaintiff Inzola, David Chernos, asked Patteson who knew about the arrangement for $480,000 in public funds to be sent to Dominus to secure the land.

“Up until today, council hasn’t been advised that the city funded the option payment?” Chernos asked.

“That’s correct,” Patteson replied.

“Within the city staff, you knew this, correct?”

“Yes,” Patteson responded.

“Mr. Lewis knew this?” asked Chernos, referring to then treasurer Mo Lewis.

“Yes,” Patteson repeated, before acknowledging city manager Deborah Dubenofsky was also aware of the arrangement.

When Patteson was asked if Fennell knew the city had funded the $480,000 payment, he said, “I don’t know if the mayor knew.”

Three councillors, John Sprovieri, Grant Gibson and Elaine Moore, have testified that they were never told by staff about the city-funded $480,000 payment to secure the property.

Testifying this past June, Moore accused Lewis, the treasurer, of lying to her and the rest of council at the March 2011 council meeting by saying that Dominus had secured the First Choice property.

“I was very upset that he lied to me in public,” Moore testified.

Lewis, now the acting CAO of Niagara Region, responded in an email to the Star and Guardian: “I did not lie to Brampton Council.”

John Corbett, Brampton’s former commissioner of planning and development, who was later promoted to the role of city manager, also testified recently. He said he didn’t learn of the $480,000 payment until long after his 2012 promotion.

“When I was then privy to the records as City Manager, I was able to see that that transaction was being done without the knowledge of council,” Corbett said, according to transcripts filed with the court. “I had both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Patteson in my office. I relayed to them as a city official, as a professional planner, as a practitioner in this field, that I would never, ever spend ($480,000) of taxpayer’s money without explicit council direction and authorization and the records showed otherwise. And I didn’t want any part of that...”

In a response for this article, the City of Brampton did not directly address the $480,000 payment in 2011. It did say that in 2014, when the city ultimately bought the First Choice property, council approved the transaction.

The purchase was made after council decided not to proceed beyond the first phase of Dominus’s originally-proposed three-phase downtown redevelopment. There are currently no plans to build the downtown library that was a key component of the city’s requested redevelopment proposal.