Tory exasperated by stories of TCH mismanagement
Posted July 22, 2015 6:49 pm.
Last Updated July 22, 2015 7:25 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Mayor John Tory is frustrated by the accusations of botched repairs and mismanaged money at Toronto Community Housing.
“It just breaks my heart when I see stories like I saw on Citytv,” Tory told the media on Wednesday.
The comment was made in reference to an exclusive CityNews story that aired Tuesday, exposing internal TCH emails written by senior frontline staff. In the emails, staff expressed concerns about renovations done on several TCH stand-alone homes.
One home near Eastern Avenue and Leslie Street was described as “still sitting empty, has been over one year now. A fiasco trying to renovate…done ass backwards..cosmetic interior work done first, rather than exterior work first in order to stop the weather.”
A TCH insider also provided CityNews with a video shot last week showing damage to the home caused by a leaking roof just months after it was renovated on the inside. Further emails suggest this case is not an isolated incident.
A spokesperson for TCH vehemently disputed the allegations.
“We have carefully gone over all the work records and work orders,” TCH’s Lisa Murray said. “And of the examples that were brought to (CityNews’) attention it has been demonstrated that the roofs were not leaking before the interiors were done.”
“We did do the inspections,” she said. “The roofs were not leaking, there was no sign of leaks, and the interior repairs went on.”
Mayor Tory vowed to put a stop to it.
“It breaks my heart when I see these stories saying we did the repairs inside the house without fixing the roof and then leaks inside the house caused all the repairs to be ruined,” Tory said. “This is the kind of things that exasperate taxpayers – frankly it exasperates me.”
Tory has asked both the provincial and federal governments to each share a third of the $2.6 billion needed to turn around the backlog in TCH repairs.
Former Toronto mayor Art Eggleton is leading a task force on how TCH is being run. He admits that there’s problems with the day-to-day operations and governance at the housing corporation.
“From everything we’ve heard, there is no confidence in terms of the ability to do these repairs properly,” he said. “I think some of them are done properly, but there’s a lot that aren’t and there needs to be a lot of improvement.”
