City of Winnipeg wants to spend additional $2.25M on police HQ lawsuit
Money would be used to hire extra lawyers, forensic accountants to help build case, city says
The City of Winnipeg is looking to back its lawsuit over the construction of the police headquarters with a couple of million dollars in additional funding to pay for legal work and hire forensic accountants to help its case.
Councillors on the city's executive policy committee will consider a motion next week to add $2.25 million to the $600,000 sum already earmarked for the case.
The city is suing Caspian Construction, former city chief administrative officer Phil Sheegl and other contractors and consultants for their parts in an estimated $70 million in cost overruns on the police headquarters construction project.
The city alleges in a statement of claim filed in January that it was deceived by various contractors — including its own former CAO Sheegl — over the construction of the troubled police headquarters.
An administrative report to the executive policy committee says because the city's legal services department only has four full-time litigators, it's necessary to hire external legal counsel to help with the significant amount of resources and specialized expertise needed to prepare its case.
In addition, there are millions documents to go through and organize, which would be impossible without the help of a forensic accounting firm, the report says.
Mayor Brian Bowman said the city is hoping recoup tens of millions from the lawsuit.
"This is an unprecedented legal action the city is engaging in right now to really recoup funds from one of the biggest scandals affecting the City of Winnipeg in, certainly, modern history," he said.
"It will involve resources to pursue the accountability that Winnipeggers have demanded."
He also said the lawsuit wouldn't be necessary if the province had chosen to call a public inquiry into the issues.
The province has said that its decision to reject a public inquiry aligns with a recently concluded five-year police investigation, which ruled there wasn't enough evidence to convict.
None of the city's allegations have been proven in court.
Several of the defendants named in the suit have said in court documents that even if the city's claims are true, the facts laid out in the lawsuit don't support the city's accusations.