The Town of Huntingdon’s elected officials are favourably receiving the report produced by the Municipal Affairs Ministry (MAMOT) regarding the awarding of contracts to the Haut-Saint-Laurent MRC.
In this report produced by the Ministry’s Verification service, several irregularities were discovered concerning the municipal Code, whether it be the requests for bids, the evaluation of offers, the choice of selection criteria for the competition and the division of contracts into several contracts.
Other oversights have also been detected in certain management practices, such as the publication of calls for public bids in the newspaper.
For its part, the MRC believes that most of the irregularities were due to a lack of resources which was filled by the hiring of additional personnel. In addition, during this period (2010-13), the MRC had sustained a substantial increase in requests for access to documents and information.
Questioned on the subject of this report, Mayor Andre Brunette was delighted that the Ministry in this way arrived at the same facts that Huntingdon had noticed about the MRC’s way of doing things. Moreover, all the members of Council are showing themselves to be in solidarity with the steps that had been undertaken in this case by former Mayor Stephane Gendron.
However, everything indicates that all the Haut-Saint-Laurent mayors are not on the same wavelength. At the last MRC public meeting, exchanges were virulent to say the least, notably on the question affecting the refund of legal expenses spent by director general Francois Landreville in his defamation lawsuit against ex-mayor Gendron. Huntingdon, as mentioned in the ministry’s report, is of the opinion that these legal costs were not to be defrayed by the taxpayers.
