EDMONTON — Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi says he did not direct city administrators to withhold critical water utility recommendations while serving as Calgary's mayor in 2015, even though a UCP-commissioned independent investigation found he saw the information before it was presented to city council."I haven't read the whole report, but I got one line off the first page, and that one line is 'The evidence does not establish that the mayor directly or knowingly approved the omissions,'" Nenshi told reporters on Thursday..The opposition leader was uncharacteristically sharp with reporters on Thursday as he faces pressure after the UCP government released its independent investigation into Calgary's water infrastructure, conducted by former Alberta Energy Regulator chair David Goldie.Goldie's investigation examined Calgary's management, administration and operations relating to the Bearspaw South Feeder Main, from the 2004 McKnight Boulevard water main failure through June 2026.Among the findings was that city administrators in 2015 "consciously" omitted five recommendations from an independent review of the finances and governance of Calgary's water, wastewater, drainage and reclaimed-water utilities.The report states that senior administration, led by then-city manager Jeffrey Fielding, debated the report's nine recommendations. The draft-final report was emailed to Fielding, chief financial officer Eric Sawyer, then-mayor Naheed Nenshi and his chief of staff, Chima Nkemdirim, in late November 2015.The 2015 report was later presented to the remainder of Calgary city council, minus the five recommendations, many of which Goldie says address issues Calgarians are currently facing.“A decade later, the Independent Review Panel and this Inspection independently identified many of the same institutional safeguards, underscoring the continuing significance of the governance and financial-accountability issues Raftelis had identified,” the report reads..The Western Standard asked Nenshi on Thursday whether he saw the 2015 report and its full recommendations before city council received them. The former Calgary mayor said he doesn't "recall them specifically.""The mayor's office always gets briefed," Nenshi said. "The mayor's office does not direct administration on what to present, and that report."Goldie is confident Nenshi saw the full report and says he has the documents to support that conclusion."I've seen presentations or reviewed presentations of briefing packages that he was provided on a couple of occasions," Goldie told reporters. "It was confirmed by Mr. Pritchard, who was the head of utility at the time, that those meetings occurred. They were in July and October of 2015."He also reviewed documents showing Nenshi received the draft-final report and briefing in November 2015. Pritchard also requested another meeting with the mayor before the report was published, but Goldie could not confirm whether it took place..The UCP is not allowing Nenshi to claim innocence either. "Naheed Nenshi had the report. He had the recommendations. He had every opportunity to act. But he decided instead to ignore key recommendations in the report and to hide it from all city councillors," reads a quote from MLA for Chestermere-Strathmore Chantelle de Jonge in a UCP press release. "For someone who never misses an opportunity to tell Albertans how everything should be managed, Naheed Nenshi had remarkably little interest in acting when experts put real problems on his desk.”Goldie could not get a definitive answer as to why the five recommendations were omitted, nor could he determine the extent of Nenshi's involvement.Nenshi and the other administrators involved claimed to have "little memory of the process" when interviewed for the investigation."Although the evidence does not establish that the Mayor directed or knowingly approved the omissions, the Mayor’s Office was part of a pre-Council briefing and consultation process in which it was informed while Council collectively was not," the report reads..Nenshi is using the statement as vindication that he had no involvement in the recommendations being omitted from the report presented to City Council.However, the inspector is not clearing Nenshi."I have no particular findings regarding Mr. Nenshi other than to say we don't know what he did with the information," Goldie said. "It's not — I couldn't determine that. That's, that's the extent of what I know."Goldie said he lacked the information needed to determine whether Nenshi directed the administrators or what his level of involvement was, beyond knowing that the report was presented to him and that a meeting took place."I'm glad that he said that, but that is spin of the utmost," Nenshi said on Thursday. "You can't say that somebody committed a crime by saying, 'Oh, there is no evidence they didn't.'"The UCP is using the situation to question Nenshi's leadership abilities. "For years, Nenshi has attempted to sell himself as the smartest guy in the room — but his record tells another story," their press release reads. "When experts put a warning in front of him about Calgary's water system, he failed to act. Nearly ten years later, after two major infrastructure failures, another independent report arrived at many of the same conclusions.".Nenshi was defensive on Thursday, turning the questions around on numerous occasions and questioning why the report was needed.Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams said the initial independent review panel report, published in January, focused on the technical issues with Calgary's water infrastructure, while Goldie's investigation examined governance.The opposition leader also questioned why Goldie had to determine whether he directed administrators to omit the recommendations."It's because this government put out a personal vendetta to try and find a smoking gun on me, and they used taxpayer money that could have been used for other things," Nenshi said. "It could have been used to fix water pipes, or fill potholes, or do all the things municipalities have to do."He theorized that the investigation cost the City of Calgary between $40 million and $50 million. The UCP has said the investigation cost Albertans $1.2 million, which Williams described as a standard amount."I'd say this might be the largest failure of a core service in recent memory for Albertans, Calgarians for sure," Williams told reporters. "We saw hundreds of thousands of Calgarians limit and sometimes not have access to drinking water."
