May 28, 2026, at 1:00 PM

Original link

The meeting is called to order at 1:02 PM; it being noted that Mayor J. Morgan, Deputy Mayor S. Lewis, and Councillor E. Peloza were in remote attendance.

1.   Disclosures of Pecuniary Interest

That it BE NOTED that no pecuniary interests were disclosed.

2.   Consent

Moved by S. Hillier

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That Consent Items 2.1 to 2.3 BE APPROVED.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

2.1   2026 Corporate Asset Management Plan Progress Review

2026-05-28 Staff Report - 2026 Corporate Asset Management Plan

Moved by S. Hillier

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports, the report regarding the 2026 Corporate Asset Management Plan Progress Review BE RECEIVED for information.

Motion Passed

2.2   Request for Shareholder’s Meeting - London & Middlesex Community Housing

2026-05-28 Submission - AGM Request-LMCH

Moved by S. Hillier

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That the following actions be taken with respect to the 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Shareholder for London & Middlesex Community Housing:

a)      the 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Shareholder for London & Middlesex Community Housing BE HELD at a meeting of the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee on June 16, 2026, for the purpose of receiving the report from the Board of Directors of London & Middlesex Community Housing in accordance with the Shareholder Declaration and the Business Corporations Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. B.16; and

b)      the City Clerk BE DIRECTED to provide notice of the 2025 Annual Meeting to the Board of Directors for London & Middlesex Community Housing and to invite the Chair of the Board and the Chief Executive Officer of London & Middlesex Community Housing to attend the Annual Meeting and present the report of the Board in accordance with the Shareholder Declaration;

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated May 4, 2026, from P. Chisholm, Chief Executive Officer, London & Middlesex Community Housing with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed

2.3   Request for Shareholder’s Meeting - Housing Development Corporation, London

2026-05-28 Submission - (2.3) HDC Shareholders Request

Moved by S. Hillier

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That the following actions be taken with respect to the 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Shareholder for the Housing Development Corporation, London (HDC):

a)      the 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Shareholder for the Housing Development Corporation, London (HDC) BE HELD at a meeting of the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee on June 16, 2026, for the purpose of receiving the report from the Board of Directors of the Housing Development Corporation, London (HDC) in accordance with the Shareholder Declaration and the Business Corporations Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. B.16; and

b)      the City Clerk BE DIRECTED to provide notice of the 2025 Annual Meeting to the Board of Directors for the Housing Development Corporation, London (HDC) and to invite the President and CEO and the Board/Chair to attend at the Annual Meeting and present the report of the Board in accordance with the Shareholder Declaration;

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated May 11, 2026, from M. Feldberg, President and CEO, Housing Development Corporation, London, with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed

2.4   Strategic Plan Implementation Update: Mid-Year 2026

2026-05-28 Staff Report - (2.4) Strategic Plan Implementation Update Mid-Year 2026

Moved by H. McAlister

Seconded by S. Hillier

That, on the recommendation of the City Manager, the report including the 2026 Mid-Year Strategic Plan Implementation Update, as appended to the staff report dated May 28, 2026, BE RECEIVED for information; it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a communication dated May 26, 2026 from G. Henderson, CEO, London Chamber of Commerce with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (12 to 1)

2.5   RBC Place London Steam Transition

2026-05-28 Staff Report - (2.5) RBC Place Steam Transition

Moved by S. Stevenson

Seconded by J. Pribil

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports, the following actions be taken with respect to transitioning RBC Place London from steam service for heating and humidification purposes by October 30, 2027:

a)    the report entitled RBC Place London Steam Transition BE RECEIVED;

b)    the financing for this project BE APPROVED as outlined in the Source of Financing, as appended to the staff report dated May 28, 2026 as Appendix “A”; it being noted that in order to accommodate the RBC Place London request, transfers of funds from the City’s Capital Infrastructure Gap Reserve Fund and the City’s Corporate Contingency in the total amount of $6,788,880 (excluding HST, including contingency) is required; and

c)    the Civic Administration BE DIRECTED to provide a report to the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee with an update on funding once the project cost is known and the contingency amount has been revised.

Motion Passed (13 to 0)

2026-05-28 Staff Report - (2.6) Review of RFPQ 2025-056 Redevelopment of City Hall Campus

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports, the report dated May 28, 2026, titled “Review of RFPQ 2025-056 – Redevelopment of City Hall Campus Procurement and Related Information” BE RECEIVED for information.

Motion Passed (10 to 1)

3.   Scheduled Items

3.1   Not to be heard before 1:05 PM - London Hydro Inc. - 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Shareholder Annual Resolutions

2026-05-28 Staff Report - (3.1) AGM - London Hydro

Moved by P. Van Meerbergen

Seconded by S. Franke

That, the following actions be taken with respect to London Hydro Inc.:

a)   the proposed by-law, as appended to the staff report dated May 28, 2026 as Appendix “A”, entitled “A by-law to ratify and confirm the Annual Resolutions of the Shareholder of London Hydro Inc.” BE INTRODUCED at the Municipal Council meeting to be held on June 2, 2026;

b)   the presentation by Y. Semsedini, CEO and T. Goodine, Board Chair, London Hydro Inc., BE RECEIVED;

c)   the Summary of the 2025 Financial Results BE RECEIVED; and

d)   the communication regarding the Draft Shareholder Resolution BE RECEIVED.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.2   Delegation - Ysni Semsedini, Chief Executive Officer, London Hydro Inc. - London Hydro Holdings Inc. (“NewCo”)

2026-05-28 Submission - (3.2) London Hydro Holdings Inc2

Moved by P. Cuddy

Seconded by D. Ferreira

That the following actions be taken with respect to the revival of London Hydro Holdings Inc.:

a)  Tania Goodine and Paul Madden BE APPOINTED to the London Hydro Holdings Inc. for a term of 1 year;

b)  Mayor J. Morgan BE APPOINTED as the member appointed from Municipal Council; and

c)  the communication dated May 1, 2026 from Y. Semsedini, CEO, London Hydro Inc. BE RECEIVED;

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee heard a verbal delegation from Y. Semsedini, CEO, London Hydro Inc. with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.3   Delegation - Kelly Paleczny, General Manager, London Transit Commission - 2025 London Transit Commission Annual Report

2026-05-28 Submission - (3.3) 2025 LTC Annual Report

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by A. Hopkins

That the London Transit Commission 2025 Annual Report BE RECEIVED; it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a presentation from K. Paleczny, General Manager, London Transit Commission with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (15 to 0)

3.4   Delegation - Paul Chisholm, Chief Executive Officer and Phil Squire, Board Chair, London & Middlesex Community Housing - LMCH Master Regeneration Plan

2026-05-28 Submission - Master Regeneration Plan-LMCH1

Moved by H. McAlister

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That the London & Middlesex Community Housing’s 15-Year Regeneration Plan BE RECEIVED; it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee received a presentation from P. Chisholm, Chief Executive Officer and P. Squire, Board Chair, London & Middlesex Community Housing with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (13 to 2)

4.   Items for Direction

4.1   Review of the London & Middlesex Community Housing Master Regeneration Plan

2026-05-28 Staff Report - (4.1) Review of the LMCH Master Regeneration Plan

Moved by H. McAlister

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That, on the recommendation of the Deputy City Manager, Finance Supports and the Deputy City Manager, Housing and Community Growth, the report on the London and Middlesex Community Housing Master Regeneration Plan BE RECEIVED for information.

Motion Passed (13 to 2)

ADDITIONAL VOTES:

Moved by J. Pribil

Seconded by S. Franke

That the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee recess at this time, for 10 minutes.

Motion Passed

The Committee recesses at 3:32 PM and reconvenes at 3:44 PM.

4.2   London Transit Commission Governance Review: Findings and Recommendations

2026-05-28 Staff Report - (4.2) LTC Governance Review

Moved by S. Franke

Seconded by A. Hopkins

That, on the Recommendation of the City Manager, the following actions be taken with respect to the London Transit Commission Governance Review findings and recommendations:

a)    the recommendations of the London Transit Commission Governance Review, as set out in Appendix “A” as appended to the staff report dated May 28, 2026, BE ENDORSED;

b)    the Civic Administration BE DIRECTED to prepare and bring forward to a future meeting of the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee any necessary amendments to applicable by-laws required to implement the recommendations;

c)    the London Transit Commission BE DIRECTED to review the recommendations and report back to Council on implementation, including the development of a business case for any associated resource requirements;

d)    the Civic Administration BE AUTHORIZED to undertake all the administrative acts that are necessary in connection with the London Transit Commission Governance Review project; and

e)    the report dated May 28, 2026, BE RECEIVED;

it being noted that the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee heard a delegation from B. Peever, J. Cameron and K. McCaffrey, KPMG Canada and received communications from the Accessible London Coalition and S. Holmes with respect to this matter.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

4.3   Request to Maintain the Size of the London Police Service Board at Seven Members

2026-05-28 Submission - (4.3) Request to Maintain Size of Members-LPSB

Moved by S. Lehman

Seconded by S. Trosow

That the following actions be taken with respect to the London Police Service Board composition:

a)  in accordance with section 31 of the Community Safety and Policing Act, 2019 the size of London Police Service Board BE MAINTAINED at seven (7) members, consistent with the composition permitted under the Community Safety and Policing Act, 2019 and the direction of Municipal Council at its December 19, 2016 meeting; and

b)  the communication dated May 12, 2026, from R. Gauss Chair, London Police Service Board BE RECEIVED.

Motion Passed (14 to 0)

5.   Deferred Matters/Additional Business

None.

6.   Confidential 

None.

7.   Adjournment

Moved by P. Van Meerbergen

Seconded by P. Cuddy

That the meeting BE ADJOURNED.

Motion Passed

The meeting adjourned at 5:17 PM.

Full Transcript

Transcript provided by Lillian Skinner’s London Council Archive. Note: This is an automated speech-to-text transcript and may contain errors. Speaker names are not identified.

View full transcript (4 hours, 32 minutes)

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the seventh meeting of SPPC’s Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee. We’ll begin with a land acknowledgement. The city of London is situated on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lenofuik, and Adawandran.

We honor and respect the history, languages, and culture of the diverse indigenous people who call this territory home. The city of London is currently home to many First Nation, Métis, and Inuit today. As representatives of the people of the city of London, are grateful to have the opportunity to work and live in this territory. The City of London is committed to making every effort to provide alternate formats and communication support for meetings upon request.

To make a request specific to this meeting, please contact SPPC at London.ca or 519-661-2489 extension 2425. And with that, we’ll start in on our agenda, looking at item number one, disclosures of to the CUNY area interest. Seeing none, and just to make everyone on committee aware, we have two members joining online. Mayor Morgan is joining us, as well as Councillor Palosa.

Thank you both, and in chambers, we have all members of committee, except for Deputy Mayor Lewis and Councillor Van Meerbergen. Okay, we’re moving on to item number two, which is consent. I’ve been asked to pull items 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6, unless anyone else is looking to pull 2.1 through 2.3. I will look for somebody to move 2.1, 2.3.

Thank you, Councillor Hillier, looking for a seconder. Thank you, Councillor Cuddy. And with that, we will look for discussion on items 2.1 through 2.3. I’ll start with Councillor Hopkins, go ahead.

Yeah, thank you Madam Chair. And through you, I wanna thank staff. I have a comment and a quick question on 2.1, which is the Corporate Asset Management Plan Progress Review. really appreciated the report.

Very supportive as strengthening our integration with the multi-year budget, as well as our corporate asset management coming together. A question through you is, Madam Chair, to staff, is when can we expect more of a comprehensive update? I know this is a partial update, but how do we get the big picture when can Council expect it? Thank you, I’ll go to Ms.

Barbone. Thank you through the chair. The capital asset management team is actually working on that right now. And I’ll defer to Mr.

Sunnis who can provide you some updates on the status of their work to date, but it will be coming forward in 2027. Thank you, I’ll go to Mr. Sunnis. Through the chair, yep.

What we’re doing is we’re currently in development, working with all of our service partners. We’re making really good progress on doing the next round of comprehensive asset management plan. We’re targeting bringing forward a report to council in the spring of 2027. At that point in time, we’ll be seeking approval all of our corporate asset management plans for not only the direct city owned assets, but also the agency’s boards and commissions.

Thank you very much. Councillor? Yeah, thank you. I think that’s when the big picture comes together.

So looking forward to the next council receiving the comprehensive plan. I’d like to make a quick comment through you just staff. I know conservation authorities, which can look at our ABCs here in the report. Conservation authorities are going to be going through a major review and expectations to have things up and going in February 2027.

So just would like to encourage staff and conservation staff working together, having a better understanding how that all works and how it may shift or not, but lots of changes going forward in some of our boards. So thank you very much for the report. Thank you. I’m looking for other speakers and items 2.1 through 2.3.

Councilor Cribble, go ahead. Thank you. So to the staff, last year in this report, we had one more call on multi-year budget impact on GAP. And it was dropped for this year.

I was just wondering what was the reasoning for not including it this year. Thank you. I will go to Mr. Sneaks.

Go ahead. Yeah, thank you very much to the chair. What’s happened here is that when we look at the progression of the asset management plan, we had originally reported back in the 2023 direct city owned assets, an infrastructure gap of $946.1 million. Now what we’re doing is we’re just simply doing annual progress update reports, which are just simply reporting primarily on the changes to the budget.

As you will have noticed, there was a significant reduction to the infrastructure gap in the 2025 annual progress report as a result of council’s decisions to invest more into life circle renewal capital assets. For the 2026 annual progress update report that’s in front of you today, there was a very minimal change to the infrastructure gap as a result of, again, just minor changes to the budget. As a result, we didn’t feel as necessary to include that additional information. Thank you.

Councilor Pervall. Okay, thank you for that. And when I went through the volumes, both replacement and camp plans and current LOS gap, I did find them there almost identical actually. But am I assuming then accurately, if I were to add this multi-year budget impact gap that it matches last years?

Because if it’s matches last years, then there’s no issue, it’s the same thing. if it would change in the end some of them potentially then it would make a difference. So I just want to assure that it’s still the same. Thank you.

Mr. sneeze. Oh yeah through the chair. So what what we would find is very immaterial changes amongst the different service components.

Again we’re looking at the most most recent council approved budget update which includes the multi-year budget. So again when you ‘re looking at the material change that occurred those occurred during the 2024 multi-year budget where there was larger swings in terms of investment choices with regards to the life circuit renewal capital budgets again we ‘re looking at the changes from the 2025 progress report to the 2026 very small changes generally occur amongst the servicers again that’s why you’re buying a very minimal reduction or minimal change to the gap thank you. Council approval. Okay thank you for the explanation just one quick thing so non- identified decreased non-identified increased they would be identical to last year is that correct?

Mr. Sunnis. Through the chair yeah like I wouldn ‘t use the word identical again and there’s very minor change, but then what’s been the largest change on the G AP is that the LMCH Aladdin of New York Six Housing Asset Management Plan was approved by Council in 2025. That was previously not in the 2025 annual progress report for the CAM plan update.

So what’s happened there is that GAP has been, has changed and that’s been added to the progress review. So if you’re looking exactly at the 2025 annual progress review for CAM versus the 2026, the LMCH has been an added component on the progress review for this cycle that was not previously in my cycle as a result of council approving the LMCH asset management plan. Thank you for the answers, no more questions. Thank you, welcome Deputy Mayor Lewis and Councilor Van Mierbergen.

We are on items 2.1 through 2.3, just looking for any other speakers. Seeing none online and seeing none in chambers, we’ll open the vote. Council votes yes. Building the vote, motion carries 15 to zero.

And for those in the gallery and those with deleg ations, we will move those items to 0.4, 2.6 to item five on the agenda, which is our additional business. With that, we’ll move to item three, which is our scheduled items. Our first item is 3.1, which is the London Hydro Inc 2025 Annual General Meeting of the Shareholder Annual Resolutions. We have a presentation first from London Hydro.

With the presentations that we have today, We do not require a motion to hear those presentations. And I know that everyone is tight to time on five minutes. So thank you for that. And with that, we will get set for our presentation from London Hydro.

My name is Tanya Godine. And I’m the chair of London Hydro’s Board of Directors. Very proud to share details of our 2025 year. What you will hear today reflects an organization continuing to demonstrate strong governance, thoughtful planning, and a disciplined approach operational and financial performance.

Throughout 2025, London Hydro remained focused on delivering value for customers and our shareholder while continuing to prepare for the opportunities and challenges ahead. The board has continued to work alongside leadership to ensure decisions are grounded in long-term thinking, responsible investment, and a clear commitment to reliability , safety, and sustainability. As our city grows and the energy landscape continues to evolve, The importance of strategic planning, infrastructure readiness, and organizational resilience has never been greater. Over the past year, we saw continued progress in areas including grid modernization, operational improvement, customer support initiatives, and organizational transformation.

These efforts reflect not only strong execution, but rigorous planning, collaboration, and the accountability required to position London Hydro for continued success in the long term. As a board, we’re proud to support an organization focused on today’s performance and building the foundation for the future. That includes investing in infrastructure, strengthening internal processes, supporting innovation, and ensuring London Hydro remains well positioned to meet the needs of our customers and our community. On behalf of the board of directors, I would like to thank the entire team at London Hydro, many of them here today, for their dedication and continued commitment to excellence.

I would also like to thank you, our shareholders, our customers, partners, and our community stakeholders for ongoing trust and support. Together, we’re continuing to build a strong, resilient, forward-looking organization well positioned for the future. Thank you. Thank you, Ms.

Katain. We’ll hear from Mr. Samsadini. Go ahead.

Hello. Good afternoon. I am not going to go through this whole presentation, so the one slide I will bring up is the reason we are actually here today, which is the business of the AGM. There’s essentially three things that we’re here to get either approval or received from council.

Those are on the approval of the financial statements, the election affirmation of continuing in terms of directors, and then the appointment of the auditors. In that order, I would say the financial statements, we did review the financial statements with city administration. They are aware of those financial statements. They have been approved by our auditors and our board of directors.

The 2025 year actually looks very similar to the 2024 year, $11.1 million in net income, $5.5 million dividend paid or will be paid to the city of London. A stable rating continues and $62.8 million spent in capital over the last year. For the election and affirmation of the Board of Directors, the slate hasn’t changed. So the current Board of Directors that is sitting for London Hydro is the one that is up for recommendation in this year.

So there was no members that step down or terms that came to a final conclusion. This would be a reapp ointment of the current directors that are at London and hydro today. And finally, the appointment of the auditors, we use KPMG as our auditors. They are also the city’s auditors and actually audit most of the utilities in the province of Ontario.

So they are well regarded in this right and we put them forward as well for reappointment. We did provide a deck. I think the deck is great for folks to be able to to go through, see all the great work that was done at London Hydro this year. But being mindful of your time, I will end my presentation there and take any questions you may have.

Thank you. Just one moment. I will just double check with the clerk on how we proceed if you like a motion on the floor first before we go to questions. Okay, so we have a motion that’s displayed and I’m just looking for a mover and seconder for motion for London Hydro.

Thank you. I have Councillor Van Meerberg and Councillor Frank. With that, we will look to questions and comments from committee, and we’ll start with Councillor Layman. Thank you for attending today.

Thank you, folks, for attending as well. Just a quick comment on the financials, more to the chair and to the board. Thank you for the dividend, five and a half million. I just encourage you and the board to look at, I was this last term, I pushed for an increase, and we were able to get there as financial results improve.

I encourage the board to consider putting some of that back to the shareholder. So that’s my comments just on the financial side. Mr. Sensudini, this gives me an opportunity to kind of look back at London’s hydro performance in the recent months.

And going back to the extreme weather days that we saw Boxing Day with a storm there and then it’s recently with the tornado and the extreme weather that we saw there. I just have to commend you and your team for the response, for getting us, getting the lights on. I don’t know how you do it. In a reasonable manner, and I also want to touch on the communication side, ‘cause I witnessed that personally.

It was good to know when my lights would come on, but it was also good to know for those that didn’t get the lights on, when they could expect it on. And for my family, which I have sons and daughters around the city, it kind of allowed us to do some planning, quite frankly, where we were able to get family members over to maybe the family that had the power. And then also plan at what time we would get back or they would get back when the power came back on. And I got to tell you, those estimates were unbelievably close.

So our terrific work there, it’s one thing to keep the power on during peak demands in the summertime with the height or with the air conditioners humming and everything like that. It’s another thing to do it with the extreme weather event. So I’m just curious, you know, how do you do it? Like, how do you do damage assessment?

How do you prioritize what gets— who gets whatever is could go first, and how do you get the crews out? So if you can just kind of walk me through a bit of that, like, obviously, in detail, but just know about you. Thank you. And if you can put that non-engineering speak, it’d be great.

I’ll try my best on that. First, the first thing I’d wanna do is thank our employees. So although I sit here and give the presentations and sometimes get the kudos from counselors, it wasn’t me out there restoring the power. And we have a huge team that responds to these types of outages.

So London Hydro has around 320 employees that day of the last tornado downburst, whatever you wanna call it. We had 88 employees respond within the next few hours. Trues working overnight. We had other crews come in, contractors from Integris, people like Davy Tree answer our calls as well.

Mutual Aid is a big part of what we do in this industry with our neighbors to ensure that we can keep the power on. Essentially, in an incident like that, there’s storms that we know about when we can prepare for, and then there’s storms that sort of come out of the blue. I would say, generally, what my experience has been, those storms that we hear nothing about seem to be the worst ones. So people aren’t prepared.

They don’t know what’s gonna happen. And the good news, I think for Londoners, is that London Hydro is always ready to respond to these types of outages. So the downburst, I think, happened between five and six o’clock. As you might imagine, our teams are already home.

At that point, people got the call at home. They decided to come back in. I think you stepped out sort of the major processes that we do in a storm that way, which is first call out, get people in. Our engineering teams are out in the field, helping with our line staff to assess damaged areas, how we prioritize.

We usually go with the most customers first. If there’s large feeders, we can pick up. That’s what we try to pick up first. And I understand from our customers that there can be some frustration about being out for 12 hours or 15 hours, but know that we’re having to prioritize these types of outages.

And that will happen with the number of customers first. We will also look at critical infrastructure. If there was a hospital or some other critical infrastructure piece on a feeder, we may prioritize that to ensure that people are safe in that environment. So the general process is about people coming in, assessing the damaged location, calling in other crews externally and starting the work and trying to pick up as much of that work as we can over the next hours.

We have to split up our crews sometimes as well because as you can imagine, crews will time out. After they’ve worked 16 hours, we can’t ask them to safely work any longer so they go home the next crew comes in and works their 16- hour shift. So it really is a coordinated effort. Appreciate the city’s help on this as well.

We’re also coordinating with people who are doing tree trim ming and other work in those areas with police in streets where power lines are down. It is really a team London approach to getting the power back on and I could say I was nothing but impressed and happy with our crews. Also with the City of London’s response and of course our customers who are having to live through it. Thank you, I’ll go back to Councillor Layman.

Thank you and through you, Chair, one final question. You know, as we are aware that extreme weather events are going to increase in the years to come, what is London Hydro learning from these experiences where you can even get better improve on your service? Thank you, Mr. Simpson, need to go ahead.

Yeah, I think we’re learning a few lessons. One is, you know, our capital investment plan matters. The stronger, the more resilient your capital assets out in the field. The more that they will be able to resist this extreme weather, we’re also designing for more extreme weather in our minds.

So, where we build infrastructure underground, for example, we might use a larger poll type, we might put polls closer together to handle the extreme weather events. We’ve also got some really interesting technology we’re trying out this year. There’s some work that we’re doing some overhead satellite imagery to look at trees that we think are what we call sort of in the fall zone. So, if there is a storm event and we’re worried about branches, large trees that may be sick in that area, we can actually be more proactive and start to trim those areas before the storm happens to hopefully cause less outages in the future.

I think our teams are unfortunately getting the training on these things. I mean, in the year and a half that I’ve been here, I think we had something that almost appeared to be a tornado on the west end of the city about a year, a year and a half ago. We had the ice storm that happened over Boxing Day. We’ve had now the tornado or downburst happen on the east and south ends of the city.

So the good bad news about that is our emergency response is being flexed. We know what works. We know what neighbors we can call on. And so that sort of time in the exercise is also helpful to us to get better at it.

And that’s where our communication came in as well. I think as an organization, we knew we were a little bit lacking in how we communicated with our customers. people want to know that you’re aware of their outage. People want to know that there’s crews being sent to their area, and people want to know when they can expect their power to come back on.

So we’re really trying to put a full press on getting that information as out and as accurately as we can and as timely as we can. Councillor Layman. Just finally, thank you for that. No hydro is a critical utility or the livability of London and also for the economic success of London and with that comes you know to have a reliable power source I think it’s crucial for both those areas and I think you ‘re delivering on those friends so thank you very much.

Thank you. On my speaker’s list I have Councillor Perbal next followed by Mayor Morgan and then Councillor Cuddy. Thank you Mr. Chair yes everyone was first thank you but I also want to include our stop because the coordination cooperation between the organizations and theme was really exemplary so it was greatly appreciated by half a million of Londoners, thank you.

Last year, you were presented to us 20/30 vision with five pillars, five strategic focuses. Can you update us in terms of the kind of the opportunities, challenges, and potentially the biggest game changers? I know it’s at the beginning of the five-year vision, but can you just pinpoint few of them, summarize? Thank you.

Mr. Samcedini. Yeah, so, you know, our five pillars, I can sort of go through them individually. You know, one of them is building for the future.

I think as we look at our distribution system plan that we’re putting forward, we’re working through that. We’re looking to get that finalized through our board over the next months. Really investing in the city is a big part of what we’re going to be doing. So the line that I keep using is we plan to spend as much in the next decade as we have in the last century here in the city of London.

The amount of growth happening on the electricity profile is nothing that I’ve seen before. And now having a utility that’s ready to be able to speak to increased capacity, reliability concerns, changing weather patterns is all within sort of our distribution system plan and the asset management plan that we’re putting forward. So I would say that’s going to be a critical element as we look at the next number of years. Our second pillar is about creating and communicating value.

As we heard from Councillor Layman, the dividend is important to the City of London. So if we look from early 2000s to 2001, the London Hydro has paid out $110 million in dividend to the city of London over that time. We’ve also had a Christian value within the organization over that time as well. So having an asset that’s viable for the city is important, is viable for our customers, is important and can make the investments that we need to make.

I think the other thing that we’re trying to do here in doing some of these things where or you might see us out more in the community is being able to communicate that value. And there really is efforts that the utility allows things like economic development, that by owning your own utility here in the city of London, you have an economic advantage of how we get out there and try to attract business here and build the infrastructure that they need to connect. Operational excellence is our third pillar, and that’s about just getting better at what we do. How do we have improved reliability?

How do we increase communications? How do we ensure the power stays on and the bills go out? So that’s something fundamental in our business every day that we’re looking at ways of upgrading our internal systems, providing things like estimated time or restoration when how did this happen, being able to answer the phone within 30 seconds of when a customer calls, really having a high standard that other businesses would wish that they could achieve levels like that. I don’t know for the rest of you, but if you’ve ever tried to call things like the CRA, you’re probably on hold a lot longer than 30 seconds to try to get through there.

We also have our customers and community as our fourth pillar. As you can see, we’re out in the community a lot more than we’ve ever been, supporting initiatives, being involved in things like sports and the arts, being involved in the food bank, trying to get our message of affordability out to customers, let people know the plans that we have available things like the Ontario electricity support program like the LEAP program for emergency assistance for customers who are under the threat of disconnection. So we’re out there a lot more being a lot more visible in this community knowing that people if they’re having an issue with their hydro paying their bills to please reach out. And finally our last pillar is all about our internal employees.

We had, like many businesses after COVID, we had an extremely high turnover rate within London Hydro, which you wouldn’t expect a lot of people think, “Oh, you go work for a good company.” You know, the great benefits, good working conditions, people tend to stay. We actually saw a 10% turnover rate for four years straight within this company from sort of 2020, 2021 to 2024, 2025. So if you look at that, 50% of the knowledge of your organization is out and trying to to get new people in trained up to be safe in the operations and carry out is very critical to us. So being named as a top employer for the second year in a row I think was a great achievement for us at London Hydro, a way to attract new talent into the city and a way to retain them as well.

So I think as I know it’s a long answer we try to be short today but as I look at all the pillars that we sort of have in our strategic plan we are doing things in every one of those areas to try to move London Hydro forward. No, thank you for that and based on your responses you truly live and breathe your culture your internal culture So thank you for that last question in terms of the financials that net earnings including swap impact I know they were slightly down compared to budgets slightly more than compared to 24 How are we looking for 26 in terms of the budget and forecast? So yeah, so last year we were I think 97% of budget Most of the sort of budget miss all happened in December. There was a couple of bankruptcies of Customers that weren’t expected last year and then of course we had the ice storm come through as well that sort of knocked down What our projected net income would have been for the end of the year this year so far I think are the last financials that I’ve seen are updates for the end of April we look to be had a budget at this point in the year again and it’s still early and there’s always some unknowns like tornadoes that you can never really account for.

But at this point, we’re looking strong for our budget year. The one thing that I would mention to council, so you see sort of a reduction in net income for about a million dollars, that’s expected in a regulated utility. As we go through our cost of service applications , we get our rates set and then for the next four years, we only get actually less than inflation over that four year time. So you can expect an erosion on your net income over that timeframe till we reset our rates again .

This will be our last time that we ever go in for a standard cost-to-service rate filing. The next time we go through, we’ll go, this is sorry, it’s technical, but it’s something called the custom IR application where we can actually get increases in our second, third, fourth, and fifth year to bring our capital in and the increased costs in on a more flat level. So I would expect that you should note this in the next four to five years that you might see a deterioration of net income over the four-year period, with the hope of going into cost of service the next time and being much more flat as we go through. Councilor.

Thank you for answering all my questions and thank you and your entire team for everything you do for our community on everyday basis. Thank you, I will go to Mayor Morgan next, then followed by Councilor Cuddy and Councilor Van Mirbergen. Yes, thank you and so through the chair, first let me echo the thanks of my colleagues to the CEO and his entire team. had on behalf of council the opportunity to address the employees of London Hydro a couple of months back about the work that they did through the winter and the ice storms.

Obviously with the recent adverse weather we know that work continues you know each and each and every day and we thank all the frontline workers who get called in to do that work you know when when we need it and so thank you again for all that you do. Obviously I’m supportive of the recommendations that are before us today from a shareholder’s perspective, I do have one question, and I also want to thank London Hydro for participating with the City of London at the last AMO conference in our delegations. It’s my view that economic development is incredibly important to the city, and I can’t move forward without adequate, safe, and reliable supply of power in the city. It’s something that we’re working on in our economic development strategy that will come forward in June, and we anticipate that there will be link ages with hydro there, but to the CEO, through the chair, I would like to know your viewpoints on the role that London Hydro can play in supporting the city’s economic development objectives in the future, because we have the advantage of having utility that we are as the sole shareholder of, others do not necessarily we have that, and I wonder how your thoughts and how we can leverage that as we move towards the release of our economic development strategy in the forthcoming weeks.

Thank you, I’ll go to Mr. Samsadini. Thank you. So I’m a firm believer in a team London approach.

I think our greatest asset is the great teams that we have across the city of London, from the city to economic development to your hydro. You know, there’s just so many people that are all pulling for the same thing, which is the economic prosperity of this region. How do we create jobs? How do we create good paying jobs?

How do we create long-term jobs that people can really establish a family and wanna live here for the long haul? So to me, it’s about that working together, that one team London approach. Electricity has become a very major part of trying to attract large sort of industrial customers today. The loads that we’re seeing of these customers are magnitudes higher than they would have been 5 , 10, or 20 years ago.

So before where we would have expected a large, we actually have a large use customer category. That category is set at five megawatts. Many customers that we get in here today may exceed 20 megawatts or higher. So the access to capacity within a region is fundamental to being able to attract these customers.

I also think the other thing that’s key and we all need to do is not be a barrier to business. So we sometimes put these companies through some hoops to try to get set up and established here. And I want to make our organization the easiest organization it is to work for. So if we’re competing against KW region, the Toronto region, anywhere, Ottawa to land a customer or another country, I want them to come here and know that we’re here for their benefit and we’ll take those roadblocks out of the way and actually be an organization that gets them to their outcome, which is to set up business here and hire people.

So for us, we’re taking that, earn every customer approach. We’re fighting for those customers. And I think doing that in concert with the great organizations across this city is what’s gonna make us successful. And I’ve already seen examples of that.

Thank you, Mayor Morgan. Yeah, just a brief comment then. I really appreciate your response on the attraction of large industrial hour consumers. I know that we’ve worked together a number of meetings that senior executives from different large companies looking to purchase land in London in concert with the work that LEDC is doing.

I know that your team has been incredibly supportive to those efforts and I just wanted to echo that I appreciate those and you know every time we get to make a large industrial announcement where we know that we have a significant consumer of power. I would say part of that landing that is not just attributable to to the work that the LEDC does in our staff at City Hall, but also to the support that London Hydro gives in ensuring that they know that there’s reliable power source and that you and your team have always found a way to say yes to their demands and I’ve seen it firsthand sitting in my office. So I greatly appreciate the work that you guys are doing. So thank you.

Thank you. I’ll go to Councillor Cudi next. Thank you, Chair and through you. And Mr.

SimCity and Ms. Goodeen and to the Board of Directors. Thank you for coming today and thank you for bringing the presentation. You know, I want a reference, and I don’t want to sound like everybody else, but I do want a reference, not the dividend, which we certainly appreciate, but the fact that you were able to duplicate another $11 million and change, $11.

5 million in income, which is really incredible because you’re growing, so there’s pressure and stress on your resources, on your financial resources, but you continue to grow the income, which is really cool, and that doesn’t always happen. just for everyone’s reference, this isn’t a gross , this is a net. So this is what’s very impressive by what you’ve done, by what your board has allowed you to do, so thank you for the work you’ve done. I am a little surprised by your turnover, because in times of economic uncertainty, people don’t leave their jobs, and I’m not quite sure where that fits, but, and I know you’re a great company, I’ve spoken to your employees, I’ve been in some of these events with you, and they love their work and they love what they do, So that’s a little challenging, I’m sure.

But what I wanted to ask you Mr. Simpson, he was, I’ve been really impressed and I appreciate seeing London Hydro become more involved in the community, whether it’s through supporting the arts and culture or local sporting events and all these initiatives you do for nonprofit organizations. So if you could, and I know you referenced a little bit earlier, but if you could please, just share with us London Hydro’s how you see these investments, these kind of investments, being an important part of your strategy, your long-term strategy, and how you balance the contributions of building these stronger connections within residential communities and the city as a whole. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Sam City-Vico. So, and I don’t want you to leave with that we have a 10% turnover rate problem. The last two years, I think that rate has dropped to under 5%.

So things have sort of stabilized on that front and the team is going forward. I think a lot of those turnovers were to do with the time that we had after COVID. People were a lot more, I don’t know, able to move, wanting to move, wanting to try new things, evaluating new things in their life, retiring, whatever that was for them. So I think we’re coming out of that issue, which is good.

And thank you for the question on sort of our community involvement. You know, the one thing that a lot of people don ‘t realize is London Hydro is entering, it’s 116 years of business. I appreciate the city of London is celebrating their bicentennial, which is great 200 years, we’re a little bit younger than you guys on that side of things. But it’s an important element to know that we are part of this community.

And I think like any good neighbors, we need to be involved in different areas. And some of that we do to support. So for example, the food bank, we know affordability is an issue, how we get involved in the food bank. It also helps us get our messaging out for things like the OESP program and LEAP program .

And I would just like to say here, if anyone’s listening to this and you’re having problems paying your Hydro bill , please contact us. There are programs available that may help. I think over 15,000 Londoners took some funding from the OESP program, which is provincially funded, which means almost $9 million came in from provincial funding to help pay Hydro bills here in the city of London. So again, if you’re struggling, if you have a child in school, sometimes university and college students as well will qualify for these programs.

I encourage you to reach out to us to ensure that we can get that money to you. We also look at other things as you’ve mentioned, the arts, sports. To us, it’s important to find our customers where they are. And we know that all Londoners don’t have the same sort of things that they look to do in their day.

So where we can support in other areas and just to let people know that we are here. We are here to help. we are a trusted community partner is important for us. And that’s how we get out.

It’s been interesting activities we’ve done as well. Some things have been around sustainability, where there was a movie night. I think that happens around the city. Those were being used with gas generators.

They were noisy. They were polluting. So we brought in electrical generators to help sort of power those events. So we see ourselves as a community partner, a neighbor.

So we like to help where we can. and also let Londoners know that we’re here to help if they need it. Councillor Cuddy. Well, thank you.

And just in closing, I consider Hydro to be gold standard and you’ve done a great job of keeping that up, Mr. Simpson, thank you. Thank you. I have Councillor Van Mirbergen followed by Coun cillor Trossa.

Thank you, Chair. I think we can all agree that any local economy like the city of London, backbone is a capable, consistent power supply and an organization that’s able to deliver it with the capacity to grow. And all these boxes are ticked off and that’s been confirmed today by this report. So I congratulate you on that because it’s absolutely fundamental to our growth and to employment and to our community as a whole .

And thank you for touching on the affordability issue. That with a kind of uncertain economy is very good to know that that’s in place. I also wanted to congratulate you on the community involvement, because that’s for me, and I think others that I’ve spoken with, is something that’s quite different than we’ve seen in the past, and quite an improvement on London Hydro’s behalf , about how active you really are in the community, and showing the face of what can be a very sterile utility, which can be frankly faceless. And so, there’s your beautiful building there on Horton.

Some may describe it as a mausoleum, but you have actually demonstrated the human face of it and that it’s active in the community. So, thank you again. Thank you. I will go to Councilor Trossenitz.

Thank you, thank you very much through the chair. I’ll keep this short because I’m pretty much just repeating a lot of what you’ve already heard. I really needed some good news today, and this report I think is our good news story of the day. What I noticed first is your involvement in the community.

And I’ve mentioned that to some of your staff and board members, and it’s something that I really appreciate. ‘Cause it shows that you go beyond the really excellent level of technological and service-oriented expertise, but you’re participating in a lot of things. And Councillor Cudi mentioned that. So I just want to say, great job.

And thank you very much for this report. I’ll be supporting all of the motions today. Thank you, looking for other speakers on this item. Okay, seeing none, we’re dealing with 3.1.

We’ve got a motion in front of you. It’s ABC and it includes the financial results, the draft shareholder resolution, as well as the presentation. And with that, we’ll open the vote. So votes, yes.

Oh, there it is. Closing the vote, motion carries 15 to zero. Thank you, that moves us to item 3.2. Another delegation with Mr.

Sam Sidini on the new co. I will invite you back to the microphone in case you wanted to add something before we begin with a consideration of appointment. I’m gonna keep this super short, just here to answer any questions on that process if any are had, but leave it to council to appoint their member. Okay, thank you.

So I will just to help with our process, I will read part of that motion for the new CO. And then I will look for a mover and seconder. So it’s on your screens as well, I believe, but the following actions be taken with respect to the revival of London Hydro Holding Inc. A, Tan Yucadine and Paul Madden be appointed to the London Hydro Holdings Inc.

for a term of one year, Mayor Morgan be appointed as the member appointed for Municipal Council and the communication date of May 1st, 2026 from Y Sampsonini, CEO, London Hydro Inc. be received. It being noted that SPPC heard of herbal delegation from YSAM/CDNCEO London Hydro with respect to this matter. With that, I’ll look for a mover.

I have Councillor Cuddy, I have Councillor Fer rera and we’ll look for discussion on this item. Okay, seeing none online, seeing none here. We will open the vote. Quilting the vote motion carries 15 to zero.

I wanna say thank you to London Hydro. Thank you, Mr. Sam Sedini and the board and staff for being here today and for a great presentation . Thank you.

Okay, with that, we will move to item 3.3, which is the delegation from Ms. Polashny, the general manager, London Transit Commission, of the 2025 London Transit Commission Annual Report. Hello and welcome, you might begin. Thank you, Madam Chair.

In addition to the overview provided in the covering letter from the Commission Chair, I’ll expand on some of the key initiatives that resulted in progress towards the strategic objectives in 2025. With respect to the conventional transit service, 18,000 hours were added in the fall of 2025. And while overall ridership did decline in 2025 as compared to 2024, it was a direct result of lower enrollment in the post-secondary institutions as a result of the caps on foreign students. A positive outcome from that decline in ridership was that we had significant improvement in crowding concerns that we had been experiencing in 2024.

So well, obviously, we don’t like to see riders hip decline. It did provide for a better match to the service levels that we had in place, to the ridership that we experienced in the fall of 2025. That led to a slight improvement in the voice of the customer satisfaction level in 2025 with 68% of respondents indicating that they were satisfied with service. The primary areas of concern on the conventional from the customer perspective, continue to be on time performance and travel time while they’re riding the service.

On the specialized side, better news, we introduced 10,000 hours of service in January 2025, which resulted in a 14% increase in ridership over 2024 levels. The transition to the new booking software was completed in early 2025 with riders now having the option to book their trips both online and via telephone. And those changes have been very well received from riders, noting that in the voice of the customer survey for specialized, we saw a 98% respondent rate of level of satisfaction with respect to that service. In the area of fiscal accountability, the commission received a clean audit and closed out 2025 with healthy balances in all reserves and reserve funds.

And as part of the 2026 budget process, commission approved an assessment growth business case which will result in the purchase of four expansion buses to provide service to four new areas of the city beginning in 2028. 2025 also saw the completion of an updated asset management plan and upgrades to a number of key software programs supporting daily service delivery and work also progressed on the replacement of the hybrid facility and the zero emission bus pilot projects. Progress was also made addressing the long-standing resource issues in the skilled trades complement and enhancements to the bus operator training program were implemented in an effort to provide additional on-road training as part of our onboarding process. Looking forward, some of the initiatives that are included in the 2026 work program include consideration of another assessment growth business case for 2027 budget consideration, the launch of the secondary school transit pilot program in the fall, preparation for the launch of the east leg of the rapid transit service and the corresponding service improvements to feeder routes, preparation for the transition to a new service provider for the specialized service, which will take place not until the summer of 2027, but there’s a lot of work involved in that transition.

Undertaking a review of options to expand fare payment methods on transit, the review will consider an expanded smart card revaluing network as well as the ability to pay with debit and credit on board, undertaking a review to determine the most effective way to implement an alternative service delivery model which will provide access to public transit to areas of the city that have been identified as difficult to serve with a traditional conventional service, launch of an LTC, Instagram account and a customer insight panel and enhance participation in community events as resources have now been allocated toward this initiative. In closing, 2026 in the years following will continue to see progress on a number of transform ational programs, as well as the continued implementation of service improvements designed to enhance the customer experience, resulting in a more effective and efficient transit system for all Londoners. Thank you. Thank you.

So, we do have a motion prepared for this to receive the report. I will look for a mover and seconder before we begin discussion. Councillor Frank, Councillor Hopkins, thank you, and I will look for speakers. Councillor Hopkins.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you very much for the presentation. It’s good to see you again. I appreciate the fact that in our specialized, we’ve got extra service hours.

And I know we’ve increased in our other services as well. I understand our booking system is also improved. I saw that firsthand and I really appreciate work that staff are doing there. And congratulations as well on the voice of the customer survey, high marks there in both areas.

I do have a question though as it relates to a growing city, a large city, I represent a ward that’s all about growth subdivisions, opportunities to move around a very very difficult congestion, how we build and how we move around. I think to me as a word counselor are the big issues that I deal with on a daily basis. And I have moved around, traveled around, seen cities where service is a little bit more available. How can we as a city council, as a city, support work with LTC and improve opportunities to move around in areas where we do not have those opportunities.

And before you answer that question, thank you for a route we got last year in River Bend. And hopefully a route to come think next year, but it just seems it takes a long time and I think opportunities, we need opportunities now in our city to accommodate the congestion that we’re starting to see. So I’ll leave it with you. Thank you, Ms.

Plashney. Through the chair, the very short answer is how how can Council assist, obviously it’s funding, right? at the end of the day, transit relies on municipal funding for a significant portion of our budget. If we want to grow, we’re going to need council to approve increases to that budget.

So, I mean, that’s certainly the underlying piece . We saw in the previous budget cycle, the assessment growth case get approved. We’re working on and we will be bringing forward to the commission as part of the 2027 budget. Another assessment growth business case that will again look to other areas of the city where we’re not currently serving.

So we’re certainly making progress on that with respect to the time it takes. What you have to remember is if we’re looking at putting service into a new area or if we’re looking to add service during peak operating times, that means we have to expand our fleet. And right now the delivery time on a bus is anywhere from 15 to 18 months from the date that we order it. So if we look at the assessment growth process, for example, we can’t order that bus until that business case has been approved.

And then it’s, you know, up to 18, 20 months before we’ve actually got that bus on our property to then prep it to then be able to launch that service. So that’s a big aspect. and that’s why it’s important that through the multi-year budget process we’ve got a good indication from council what those annual incremental hours will be so that we can strategically plan for that and and kudos to the commission we have done that where we know that growth has been approved we’ve pre-ordered buses so we’ve ordered them in a group so that we will have them in time to be able to do that but in order to make that happen we need to have of those commitments within the multi-year budget so that we can plan accordingly and respond. Councilor Hopkins, thank you, looking for other speakers.

Councilor Stevenson, go ahead. Thank you, yeah, I just wanted to follow up on that question and you started to say it there but a way to pre-order. ‘Cause if we’re truly committed to meeting the service needs of a growing city, is there, does the commission have the option to take out debt or make the agreements assuming something like the assessment growth is gonna go through and then dealing with it if we don’t. Because I really like that delay of 15 to 18 months really is not gonna be acceptable.

So are there any paths forward that the commission has or maybe that council could provide to allow that flexibility? Ms. Plushney. Through the chair, historically when the balance in the provincial gas tax reserve was healthier, the commission had the potential to rely on that if funding didn’t necessarily line up and we could pre-order those kind of things.

Now that we’re relying much more on that, just to balance our budget, that reserve doesn’t have a healthy balance of that nature. But certainly, like I said, we’ve already done that once. We ordered 10 buses that kind of cover the next two and a half years of growth rather than waiting because we knew that it was approved within the multi-year capital budget essentially. So, and again, we work with civic administration on that.

When we know things are approved, we would obviously have those discussions and take those steps when we can. Councilor Stevenson. Thank you, yeah, so as a follow-up, as we’re hitting the end of this multi-year budget, it’s a little bit of a different place. So do you have the option of debt financing or are you in a spot now where you’re not able to pre-order in this case?

Ms. Plushy. Through the chair, so we have, The commission has already approved the pre-order of all the expansion buses that we need to the end of this multi-year budget. So we’ve already taken that action and when we come forward in the next multi-year, in terms of capital, we’ll have the requirements for expansion buses set out within that.

And then again, if that gets approved, we would be able to do something similar. Councillor. Thank you. So I’m hearing that we’re not really at risk of not being able to meet whatever budgetary sort of service additions we the next council might like to do is questioning through the chair we’re not at risk of not being able to respond once we have a budget approval but the commission is not the commission doesn’t have money to act on anything in addition or over and above what council approves I’m just not sure I got your question right there counselor thank you yeah I mean it’s a bit speculative right but I’m just trying to be proactive around we know we’re under serviced in many areas under that scenario would just be nice to lay the framework to set us up for success in the next couple years my questions aside from that really around public safety so how are safety incidents track and then you know what are your measures to address those and are you seeing any trends.

Ms. Plushney. Through the chair, we obviously track all issues of safety, whether it be customer to customer, customer to employee, all of those things, we track that, and we do benchmark against peer properties. In terms of trends, I wouldn’t say we’ve seen a significant change over the last number of years.

I would say compared to historic, you know, if we go back pre-COVID we have seen an escalation. We certainly did during the pandemic period see escalations and a lot of that had to do with the frustration around you know there was confusion about whether you needed to have a mask and you know all of those kind of things. So there was a lot of confusion which led to a lot of confrontation on the bus. That has gone away.

But I mean we continue to see safety issues. I mean I always say you know public transit is really just an extension of the community, so we experience the same things onboard the bus that we’re experiencing as a community. And we continue to track that and put in measures that we can to help alleviate that. We do have audio, video recording on all of the buses, so we are able to investigate and take action where we’re required.

We do have a banning process, so if somebody is found to be in contravention of our expectations, we can work with police and have them banned. So we’ve got those processes in place and we just , you know, we continue to work at it and evolve. Councillor Stevenson. Thank you and a follow-up through you.

We do hear a lot about public drug use in the transit buses and in the shelters. We’re seeing it in other cities too and what they ‘re doing to address that. When we say it’s a, you know, it’s a public space and we see the same thing we see in other spaces. Well, it’s more so in some.

So we try to get people to go downtown. We want people to take transit. People are not going to put their children or their elderly parents on buses if they don’t feel that they’re going to be safe and protected from illegal activity like that. So just wondering, is there anything on the horizon that LTC is exploring, knowing that at other cities, they’re looking at transit police and other things?

Ms. Plushney. Through the chair earlier this year, the commission did undertake a program with LPS to have police board the buses in the core, which is one of the identified areas of concern. So the foot patrols that are in the core are getting on and off buses more of just so that there’s a presence.

We’ve not had the opportunity to look at the data and determine whether or not that’s had a big impact. I can say we’re not as a commission at this point looking at the implementation of transit police. We do have inspectors, which is slightly different. Our inspectors get called any time.

There’s an incident where the operator needs assistance, but our inspectors don’t have the authority to issue a ticket or anything like that. They’re more just a next level of support for the operator in a case where there’s an incident on a bus, and then again, they would call police if it gets to the point where they can’t handle it. Councillor Stevenson. Thank you through you.

Are you noticing a trend, say, around the drug use mental health issues that’s maybe related to inclement weather? Like, is it happening more when it’s cold, hot or rainy? People looking for, basically, an escape from the elements or off hours of when we have services available for people? Again, are they, are we having more?

Are you noticing any trends that way that might support additional services that us providing it might have a double win of improving safety on the transit as well. Ms. Plushney. Through the chair, I would say we certainly have more activity on the buses during what I would say, inclement weather.

So obviously when it’s very cold, a bus is a warm, you know, a warm haven. Same if it’s extremely hot, you know, the buses are air conditioned. So we do see increases in, you know, inactivity on the buses during those periods. I wouldn’t say so much during different times of day.

I think it’s more, more to do with weather where we would notice those fluctuations. Councillor Stevenson. Thank you. My last question is just when it comes to bus shelters, is that under the purview of LTC or does the city track say the safety incidents and the safety concerns drug use within the shelters?

Or is that something that LTC is overseeing at the same time as the buses? Thank you Ms. Plesshey. through the chair, so we certainly do track it.

All of those concerns would come to us. We do work with the city in the event of, if we’ve got somebody that’s housed in the shelter, the city will make the city aware, and they assist us with removing that person from the shelter, that kind of thing. But in terms of, you know, if there’s drug parap hernalia or things like that in the shelter, those complaints come to us, and we work with our contractor to have that addressed. Councilor.

So on that note, like we’re having a lot of issues or I’m, and I’m seeing and hearing myself a lot of issues in the bus shelters in the core area. So is there anything proactively being done to make sure that those shelters are available for the transit riders? Ms. Plushney.

Through the chair, I wouldn’t say anything proactive. We certainly, as I said, we have inspectors that are on the road during hours of operation. And if they see activity or, you know, someone attempting to get settled in a shelter, they will certainly try to intervene. Again, we’ve got two inspectors on the road for the entire city, so there’s a chance that they’re not going to see everything that’s happening.

So we certainly do make efforts to mitigate that, but it’s not something I would say that we’re able to stay on top of and make sure that it’s not happening in any shelter across the city on a regular basis . Thank you. I’ll just say, and obviously we can’t make sure it’s never happens, but there’s also, I just really feel for people who are reliant on public transit, especially people who have children, because the amount of drug use that I’m seeing in the core area inside the bus shelters just makes me very grateful that I don’t have young children trying to keep them from not touching anything, sitting anything. I don’t even want to go in the shelters, I stand outside of them now.

So that’s really unfortunate, I think, and if there’s a way that we could address that, I’d be happy to work with whoever would like to work with that on me because I think it undermines some of our efforts to make sure that transit is a great thing in our city. Thank you, looking for other speakers. Okay, I have a Councillor Frank and then Councillor Pribble. Thank you, yes, I mostly just wanted to share a couple comments and thanks.

I think a really important graph is on page 10 or charts that shows that this is a very efficient service. We see the municipal cost per ride is 275 in London, the peer average is $3.81 making London the second lowest, meaning that our municipal dollars are being stretched very far to provide the service that we provide. We also see that the passenger cost-sharing is third highest compared to the other 16 Ontario transit operators of over 100, 000 people. Again, so noting that London is not necessarily paying this equivalent amount that other municipalities are in order to make it more affordable for transit users to access the service, But I just wanted to say kudos to staff for being able to to provide that service and as someone with a young child who rides the bus regularly downtown I appreciate the work that’s being done, and we ‘ve always felt safe on the bus and in shelters So appreciate the work of our staff both at the city side and the transit side.

Thank you I have Councillor perble next followed by deputy mayor Lewis Thank you and sir to chair. I want to thank you on your team as well, and I know you know in terms of the efficiency how LTC has been Very good on that side certainly and I also see when I do comparative analysis with other municipalities That they are investing actually more in their public transit than VR. So thank you for that. I do have a question for you In terms of the financials in terms of the budget for this year in forecast Are we online to deliver the numbers figures for this year?

Miss Pleschney through the chair? Short answer. Yes, we are obviously experiencing unfavorable budget budget comparisons on our fuel budget given given what’s gone on. We did a quick analysis and I mean if we if we assume that fuel pricing today stays in place until the end of this year we would be looking at about a two and a half million dollar shortfall in the budget.

Having said that as I mentioned earlier our reserves are in a healthy position and we do have about four point one million dollars in our energy management reserve which is the reserve we would would draw on to balance the budget. So we have no concern that we would be coming back to council with respect to the 2026 budget. We do have the ability to manage any shortfalls with our reserves. Councilor Provost?

Thank you. Follow up regarding the field, which was my next question. We used to LTC used to lock in rates for the fuel . Are they being locked or that doesn’t exist anymore?

Or is it kind of a market rate only? Ms. Palashini. Through the chair, we’ve never really locked in rates.

We do have a contract with a provider that essentially the rate that we pay is based on the daily published rack price with a discount. So it fluctuates daily based on what’s happening in the market, but we do have a long-term contract that includes that discount off of that rate. So we are just a subject to the fluctuations in fuel as anybody driving their car and filling up. Council approval.

Thank you, no more questions. Thank you, I have Deputy Mayor Lewestak. Thank you, Madam Chair for recognizing me. Thank you for filling in today as chair again, I very much appreciate your support as I work through this medical recovery.

So thank you for carrying on those duties for me. I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank you for that right off the top. I just wanna say for me, one of the big highlights of this is that we finally have transit funding coming through assessment growth. This is something that I have been talking about since I arrived at Council, that when growth pays for growth, it also must include growth in the transit system.

You know, I hear people on Council talking about this area is not service well or that area is not service well. That’s because for years, we have not had assessment growth to help meet the demands of a growing city. So I think it’s very important to recognize both our financial staff and Ms. Pleschney and her staff for getting together and working through how we can start to apply assessment both appropriately to transit services.

That is going to be key in order for us to continue to grow transit service that the city needs. And that means it’s not going to happen overnight , we are behind. And as new subdivisions get built out, you know, service comes after the people. don’t start running buses into subdivisions where the homes are only half occupied.

We need to be assuming subdivisions and having those places filled before we can be providing service there. I also want to say I very much appreciate the attention that LTC has paid as they look ahead to 2027 and 2028 to service in the industrial areas around Veterans Memorial Parkway and Salt road, uh, where we do have new employers, folks like the gap, Andrea, honey, pasta and others, uh , who do have employees who need transit service to get to work. And I think the plan that has been laid out by the commission for growth, uh, moving forward in that area makes a lot of sense. Uh, so while I have had lots of reasons, uh, in the past to be critical of some of these reports and have some serious questions, I want to say this year, uh, I’m very pleased to see this coming forward.

I like the direction we’re seeing. I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that I’m very pleased that the online booking system for paratransit users is up and running. While I know we have a lot of work to do still on the paratransit service, I think that that has been a very positive step forward, and I’ve heard that from members of the community. I will just finish by briefly saying, Well, I know Councillor Stevenson might see it in particular in the core, the the drug paraphern alia and and just general waste actually even in city bus shelters is not unique to the core.

It’s certainly an issue that I experience in my ward. Not so much around the Argyle Mall hub because of the volume of traffic and the services there that are being provided in terms of cleanliness, but along some of the other sheltered areas where we have shelters and where things are collecting. And some of it is is drug use paraphernalia some of it is just general garbage. so I appreciate hearing from Ms.

Pletchney about how that’s working. As we move forward, I think that there’s a whole number of components that come into play there. As we heard, you know, that’s our CIR teams, that’s transit, that’s the London Police, that there’s a whole number of partners. We’re not going to see this change overnight, but the important thing I think we heard today is that it is being worked on and it’s being worked on in partnership.

So I want to include that on positive note. I’ve been not positive on some of our previous annual reports, but this year I’m fairly positive about where things are going. And I’m glad that we are at the level we are at in terms of municipal contributions. I think that there does need to be a component of ridership pay.

I do think that we still need to look at what we’re doing around 30 seconds. Fanshawe and western students are service versus others in our community, but I think we’ll get some, perhaps some numbers from that from the transit project with the Clark Road students as well. So all in all, very happy with this report today. Thank you.

Going back to my speakers list, I have right now, no one looking for other speakers. Seeing none online, seeing none here, we will open the vote. Opposing the vote, motion carries 15 to 0. Thank you Miss Polashny.

Our next delegation is from Paul Chisholm, the Chief Executive Officer and Phil Squire, our board chair for London and Middlesex Community Housing, and this is on the L MCH Master Regeneration Plan. Thank you very much for having us here today. We thought it was important to come before you, just as a delegation. We will be back in about a month talking about our year and our operations.

We hope to have some very good news for you then. But for today, we’re talking about our regeneration plan. We think it’s one of the most important things we’ve done in our term as a board and as an organization. The plan is underway.

Reimagine one is completed. Reimagine two is underway, being constructed. Reimagine three will start construction in 2027, and plans are underway to redevelop the Ladybrook property. We’re able to do this largely because of the $29 million loan that was approved by council.

Thank you very much for that. I just want to stress so that that loan is being repaid by London Middlesex Community Housing through its tenants. Those are the people who will be regenerating their own property, which we think is important. We’re very aware from discussions with the city that any loans that we take out are held as against the city and its assets.

We understand that. I’ve had a chance to review the city report. That report will go back, we will review it. We will certainly be very prudent in terms of the money that we’re using and how we apply it and how quickly we move with the plan.

Our goal is quite simple. We wanna provide better quality housing for our tenants and along with that also be financially responsible and not require taxpayers to bear the entire burden of London and Middlesex community housing. Accordingly, as we proceed with the plan, we will require less subsidies from taxpayers while still using funds that we generate through rents to regenerate our buildings. That being said, our rents will continue to be deeply affordable.

Yes, we have our GI rents that can be as low as $ 85 a month, but even the highest rents that we might see when we regenerate and we have market value. For instance, a one bedroom will be $800 to $900 per month. And there is a significant segment of the city that requires those types of properties. Two questions that arose to me when we presented this plan was of course, how do we pay for it?

And as you’ll see from the city report, that’s a question they have too, quite rightly so . We’ll do it the same way we’ve continued to do it in a careful, measured fashion without jeopard izing London Middlesex Housing, or our tenants. We’re already doing that. We have obtained enough funding with help from the city to complete two new buildings and starve on two more.

We’re very proud of that, but more than anything, we’re proud of our tenants for being along with us on this journey that we’re taking. I also thought, what about people who don’t get a new building? What are those people going to say? What are they going to think?

Well, I can tell you that we have, and we will continue to invest dollars in our buildings. You’ll remember, I’m sure quite well when we came before you received our building condition assessments, not a positive outlook at that time. I can tell you that we’ve started the process of redoing those and they will be completed this year and you will hear about them. As for now, I can tell you that properties such as Kent Street has moved from poor to good because of the money that we’ve invested in it.

and Dorchester has moved from very poor to fair. No tenant is going to be left out on this journey . We continue to invest in our buildings and we continue to have a need for new buildings. Thank you very much and I will see you again in a month.

Thank you, Mr. Chisholm. All right, thank you, Mr. Schwartz.

And thank you to the chair, the mayor and members of council for having us here. Allen CH remains committed to keeping the city council informed and engaged in the work we’re doing in the communities. Today, we’re sharing our master regeneration plan . It’s LMCH’s long-term strategy of renew, redevelop, redevelop, and expand our housing portfolio over the next 15 years.

It’s not just a plan for building new assets. It is about people, communities, stewardship, and LMCH’s ability to deliver housing over the long-term. Why does this matter? We know that London and Middlesex continue to face significant housing needs.

LMCHE operates essential public housing infrastructure and much of that infrastructure is aging. Aging buildings create rising costs, service risk, and real impacts on tenant safety, comfort, and stability. Delaying action to increase long-term costs, sorry, delaying action increases long-term costs and limits future options. So this master regeneration plan provides LMCHE with a disciplined framework for planning, 30 seconds.

Prioritizing and sequencing and managing a risk. We did speak to over 500 stakeholders through this process and we’re deeply aligned with the city in terms of their housing need assessment and the financial realities that you face. So it creates a roadmap for us to provide a path to improve and increase affordable housing in the city of London and we appreciate your support. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. For this item, we are going to take a motion to receive and then we’ll begin discussion . Sorry, Councillor, go ahead.

I think it’s a little premature to receive this at this point. I’m going to make a motion to refer this to the annual general meeting to maybe get a little bit more detail and have a little bit more conversation. I’m not sure if this is the point in the meeting where I should lay out at least my initial concerns about this regeneration report and explain why, in my view, very, very important considerations are not addressed. Thank you.

So just on the referral. So you’re looking to move a referral of just the receipt of the plan right now? Yes, because I think we need some more conversation about it. I would like to make some suggestions about things that I think need to be supplemented .

Let me just see if you have a seconder first. Okay, I don’t see a seconder at this time. So right now I will look for a mover and seconder on receiving the plan of Councilor McAllister and Councilor Cuddy and we will begin discussion. Looking for speakers, Councilor McAllister, go ahead.

Thank you and through the chair, I’ll kick off the conversation. Just giving my perspective as a board member of L MCH, I’m actually immensely proud of the amount of work we put into this master or generation plan. When I first started on this board, I knew there was a number of challenges we were facing. But in my lifetime, I’ve never seen new housing built, new public housing built, I should say.

And in a short amount of time, we’ve been able to go from a concept to a plan to real buildings. I know some of you have had the chance to see the Southdale properties are phenomenal. We’ve got one done in phase two, but phase three as well. And as you heard from the presenters, we’re getting new units online.

And really, at the end of the day, that was my goal in terms of serving on this board, is to see new community housing built. And I think we should all, as a council, be proud of the investment we’ve made and the results we’re seeing. This is a long-term plan for the next 15 years to get more units online, to provide different levels of affordability. We’re seeing this across the board other affordable housing providers that we have mixed communities.

We will have those RGI units, but we will also have other units, which will allow us to be a more financially stable agency. And I think that that’s incredibly important is that we have that self-sufficiency and be able to ensure that we have affordable public housing stock for future generations. So I’m going to leave my comments there. I’m curious what my colleagues have to say, from my perspective.

I just want to say thank you to the other board members to LMCH staff. There’s a lot of work that’s gone into this engagement with our current tenants, the community. I’m actually immensely proud of the work we’ve been able to achieve and I look forward to what the future holds for us. Thank you.

Thank you. I have a growing speaker’s list. I have Councillor Trossa next followed by Coun cillor Stevenson, Councillor Ferrera. Councillor Trossa.

Thank you and through the chair. I want to express my overall disappointment with the report as a whole. Yes, Councillor, we ‘re doing some new things and there’s some regenor. I’m sorry, is that a point of order?

Councillor Chaucer, go ahead. Thank you. I have no issue with many parts of this report, which I think is promising overall. My problem is it does indicate the average building age is 54 years.

The deferral, I think the deferred maintenance seems to be increasing, which is putting more pressure on long-term capital programs. And I think it’s building conditions worsen. And I’m talking about it at the unit level. I don’t think that we’re serving our tenants well.

Now, your report talks about six levers. And the first one is the weakness. And my criticism of this report, I’m going to limit to the first lever, because I think, yeah, it’s great that Southdale is coming up and you’re making long-term plans to talk about doing some serious revitalization of some of your other properties in terms of making a better utilization of land. But with respect to the first key lever, building conditions at least as last reported in the asset management plan was poor to very poor.

And it’s nice to hear an oral report today that that’s improving, but that was not included in the regeneration plan. And the reason why I think the regeneration plan is inadequate, at least with respect to lever one . And maybe I should refine my motion at some point to send back lever one for a little bit more information. I just can’t accept this plan.

Now, the claim is made that the regeneration model works. I don’t think it does. I think parts of it are promising. Parts of it may work.

But unless we see some real actionable evidence about how that really, really poor, to very poor, as that management plan is being preserved, I saw what this council did with respect to total total. And I don’t want to send to the public a mixed message that we’re operating under a double standard. I want to see actionable improvements in the condition of the living conditions, the day-to-day lives of tents. So I’m not prepared to receive this report.

I’m not prepared to vote yes on the report. I would be willing to split it into its different levers, but I need to see more on that first lever before I can accept this as a whole. Now, I’ve got a lot more to say about this, which I will bring up along with some associate motions at the shareholders meeting. I’m not gonna bring them up today.

But once again, I don’t like doing a piece of this at one meeting and then another piece of it at another meeting. I’d rather put all of these important conditions, discussions together. So I’ll be voting no on this and I will. May I ask, may I ask the clerk?

Can I ask for the lever components to be voted on separately? Or is that not possible since it’s one report? It is one report. So we would take the full report, not just separate components.

Thank you in which case I can’t support receiving this, I can’t support receiving this report. At this point, I’m prepared to go into much more detail maybe on what five minutes will allow me. Thank you very much. Thank you and in just in case you’re looking to get back on the speaker’s list later, you have a minute and 10 remaining.

Okay, I have Councillor Stevenson next, followed by Ferrera and Councillor Frank. Yeah, I, you know, we hear a lot of terrible stories about life in London’s social housing units. And I think definitely we need to invest and invest heavily in this. But when we talk about housing not having been built, I think we’re forgetting about 122 baseline.

The city built that. It was brand new. There were high hopes for it. And many, many people would call that an abject failure right up until now.

I’m still hearing terrible, terrible stories about women and children, about seniors, about people who are trying to live their lives with the benefit of taxpayer-funded housing only to be subjected to illegal behavior on a daily basis. And the fact that we’re not talking about that as we invest millions, and I’m delighted to have more new housing, but it better not look like what we’ve seen so far in this term of council because then that’s a tragedy. Not just to the taxpayers who are funding it, but to the families and the people who are living in them and those who live nearby. So I really, I have not yet heard how we’ve learned from 122 baseline.

We had LMCH here a few years ago asking us to change the ratio, which we did, and we have not heard back on the success of that . The last report that we got said that surveys been sent out and not received back with enough time to give council the information that we need to make decisions. So I have questions about, you know, even just a few, like, you know, tenants who are severely drug addicted, mentally ill and doing illegal behavior from an apartment. You only need a couple of those in one apartment building to make life very unstable for everybody in that building.

So as we look to do the mix and change the mix, that sounds great as long as we’re not trying to house people who should be in highly supportive housing in our social housing buildings. And I’m still not hearing that that has been adequately addressed. And I think the language, it’s really important that we understand what we’re saying. So when we use affordable and market, I would love to know what that means because we’re We’re talking about moving towards RGI affordable and market, and yet we’re hearing markets not going to be tool market.

What is affordable? We’ve been into this before, like what is affordable housing? When we are moving away from some RGI units in our LMCH, like right now it’s 100% RGI, I’d love to know what ratio are we talking about? How many of these other units are we going to bring in and what are they?

What does affordable mean? What does market rate mean? Has it been RGI since the time it started? Is this something absolutely new that we’re bringing into LMCH or has it been done before?

And now we’re doing it again. This is exciting. I love the whole idea of regeneration but I think it’s about making wise decisions, learning from the mistakes of the past, you know, they say that for things to change, things need to change. And I think we’re not addressing the addiction crisis and the impact it’s having on our city, in transit, in housing, in our core area.

We’re going to keep talking about this and it’s not a drug toxicity crisis, it’s an addiction crisis that is causing the public safety concerns for the majority of Londoners. There’s, I have concerns in here, so I heard mention of the regeneration was going to continue to be careful and measured, I think, with the terms. So when we talk about the build Canada homes, it’s on 4.2 that civic administration is currently working on on an application to build Canada homes for capital funding. Through you to staff, what can be shared about that, about what kind of amount of dollars we’re talking about there and the time frame so that it is in alignment with that careful and measured approach.

Okay, thank you, Councillor. So this is something I just wanted to point to in general. So we’re on 3.4 still, which is the submission from LMCH. I know it’s, and then we’ll go to 4.1, which is the staff report, which refers to 4.2.

So can I save your question for then? Is that okay? Yep, 100% apologies. I moved one in front of the other.

So it talks about tenant outcomes. I really would like to hear more about that. Our mind colleagues, 122 baseline, we started with a very low rents of $600 and now up to a thousand. So I want to know that that’s not gonna happen here, that if we’re gonna offer deeply affordable housing, then sustainability comes with that financial piece as well.

There’s on page 331, it talks about responsible stewardship of public assets and sound judgment. And I think those are really important terms that are needed. On page 333, it talks about in 2026, there’s gonna be acquisitions program starts in 2026 to 2030. Counselor, that’s your time.

do you want me to go to the delegation for your question? That’d be great, thank you. Okay, I will invite Mr. Chisholm and Mr.

Squire back up to answer any questions that you heard. I’m happy to summarize some that you heard as well. Thank you and through the chair. I will, I don’t know if I caught everything through that.

One of the challenges we have faced is who we serve. We administer a rank your day and come program that does not permit us to screen applicants beyond a simple level. So that has created challenges in the past and we have worked through council and civic administration to change the way people access R GI housing in that we are seeing some improvements . However, we do know that there are people that receive housing through the wait list that require more sports than we can provide.

So we’re really happy to see the increasing amount of supportive housing and alternative housing programs out there that we hope are going to continue to support those tenants to be successful. So, you know, that is one of the challenges that we will face. And I’ve said a number of times, you know, it took us 15 plus years to sort of create a tenant population that was higher needs. It’s going to take us 10 plus to work ourselves out.

So we will still experience some challenges and our role is to sort of really make sure they’re supported to be successful. So on that point, I think you had a question, and this language does confuse me as well as on R GI versus affordable versus market. So rank year to income, as a local housing corporation, we’re responsible to provide and maintain 3282 rank year income units. This plan does not envision us increasing the number of rank year to income units we provide.

Every net new unit we add will be either affordable or market. And the key difference there is affordable housing typically means it’s a unit that’s eligible to count towards the affordability of the building, which means you can access, it used to be Canon Mortgage and Housing Corporation funding, but now Build Canada Home is funding. So this typically looks like 70 to 80% of the median market rent calculated by CMHC. And that’s that number eight to $900 that Phil was mentioning.

Even though we know there’s market units out there that would rent a one bedroom unit, we’ve seen them for 1200, 2000, 2500. So there will be a point in some of our buildings where we will have some higher market rents still probably low end of market, maybe at 1300, that offset and bring more revenue into the project. Our objective to mix the income is to mix the tenant mix to sort of make sure there’s affordable housing not those just waiting on a subsidized waiting list for five years, those who have more of an urgency and an affordability issue, but it brings the rental revenue we require in. Every new building will have a capital reserve, so we need to fund that.

And there’s the expectation that any debt financing, a mortgage that we get at the property , is funded through those increased rental amounts . So when we say each project moves on its own merit, we look at that balance between a number number of RGI units we need to put in if we’re replacing existing ones, the affordable rent and the market rent so that we have a revenue in the building that can manage reserves, debt and operations. That is the objective there. So it’s really, market is the highest rent, affordable is, you know, 70, 80% of medium market rent.

And RGI is based on the housing services act and that role. So that’s the one where people pay maybe $85 or $150 for for a unit and if you could remind me the next question. I think the council was looking for more information on the tenant mix component and the report back on that. I’ll go to her for more clarification.

Yeah, thank you. I think it was just the tenant outcomes in terms of making the regeneration be what we want it to be without vacancies and unstable housing, Mr. Chish olm. Thank you and through the chair.

Thank you for the clarification. So when we talk about tenant outcomes in this context, when we do a regeneration of the existing site, tenants are impacted. It starts to create anxiety. So we have a tenant relocation policy that sets out how we commit to tenants, what the options are when we go through relocation.

Do we move you in the existing site? Do we move you to another site? Do you want to come back? So really making sure that we have one-on-one conversations all tenants impacted so they know what’s happening to them and when so they can manage what outcome they want to see at the end of the regeneration of that community.

What we saw in Southdale people, we moved them throughout the community if they wanted to stay or it was an opportunity for them to reset somewhere else across our portfolio. So we want to make sure that we have that conversation one-on-one with all tenants so they know what to expect and when to expect it and that would be success for us in that context. Thank you. Did we answer all your questions?

The only other one was whatever you can share about the acquisition program. Go to Mr. Chisholm. Thank you and through the chair.

So the acquisition of existing rental properties is something that was introduced a few years back. British Columbia had a really healthy program where it was used to consolidate in the nonprofit sector a little bit, but also acquire some buildings that weren’t in the nonprofit world, which would sort of naturally occurring affordable housing. So it’s aging housing stock that has an affordable rent by nature and with long-term tenants. So the objective of this strategy is to possibly acquire some of those buildings so they retain them as affordable.

It wouldn’t be subsidized, but we’d be in a position to acquire the building and operate it. We’re not looking for a margin on the building, like a private operator. So we’d be able to just purchase and invest in the building, use any of the rental revenue to offset any debt acquired, and make sure that housing stays affordable for the tenants that live there today. And a natural turnover for new tenants, they would have access to that.

So it’s a way to sort of get housing in an area we’re not servicing today or a type of housing we don’t have available. It’s just an interesting strategy. And we know that built Canada Homes as one of their approaches is developing a strategy that is going to make specific funds available for that. So we want to be ready and thoughtful on how we would approach that.

Thank you. I have Councillor Ferrera next followed by Coun cillor Frank. Thanks, Chair. And thanks for the delegation.

I guess some of my questions are kind of in line a little bit with some of the comments that were already made. But I guess the first thing I want to ask is about just clarifying the motion. I do see that it’s to receive the report for the 15-year regeneration plan, but also in the report, the first five years of the regeneration plan is 300 million worth of capital monies, and then upwards of 1 billion for over 15 years. just wanted some clarification on I understand that there’s no financial ask here right now but at the same time I just wanted to get some clarification on if we were to approve this how does that translate into a future I guess report or a recommendation coming back so we’re not approving it we’re just receiving it so just received is just information but it won’t lock us in to any type of financial obligations in the future the clerk has confirmed that But that’s just to receive the report at this time and not walking us into anything.

Okay, thanks. So, like, obviously, you know, we have — I hear housing crisis, but it’s an affordable housing crisis, which is really kind of what the discussion should be about. And we see these numbers coming back, and we know that LMCH has an old stock of existing buildings that are in desperate need of capital improvement and capital repair. And I know that we had that last report when you guys came to us, and I think it was like like $100 million worth of work that we needed, but now we’re seeing it’s at 300 million.

I just want to ask, these are two separate from each other, or does this incorporate the 100 million? Go to Mr. Chisholm. Through the chair, the asset management plan in the state of the asset is considered in the master regeneration plan, and it’s a critical pillar to make sure that we have safe, well-maintained housing across all the housing we have.

So in terms of the regeneration and the redevelopment, I think the 300-year mentioning on page 17 of the report with the different project list is separate, right? So there is, in some of these projects, some deferred capital costs that will come out. So the Ladybrook project, there is capital repair and a capital repair backlog there. So should we move forward with regeneration, that cancels out the required capital work.

So there is sort of in the back end running a little assessment there, but the funding that we have right now through our infrastructure gap is addressing the current capital need when we come back with our facility condition index numbers and our projected long-term capital need as part of the 2028-31 multi-year budget, we will see some changes in those numbers . So what we’re seeing is that the approach to the building condition assessments we’re doing right now combined with cumulative impact of the investment over the last three years, because the data in the report you saw last year was 18 months old. So that cumulative impact is reducing those numbers, which provides clarity on the capital repair backlog. And you’ll see that number reduce as we sort of refine that number through the course of the year.

Councilor Ferrera. Okay, thank you for that. So going, I guess leading off on that with the one-to-one RGI replacement for the first five years, like I understand that means replacing the existing RGI units and not necessarily adding RGI units, just replacing. So I just to confirm, so within the first five years with this Regent plan, that will be a replacement one-to-one no addition to new RGI.

Mr. Chisholm. Thank you and through the chair. There is, we do not envision increase the number of our GI units we have.

So where we regenerate a site, and we take, say 18 townhouses down to build a building, those 18 are put back into the new building we have, and any net new units, we charge an affordable or a market rent, and that provides the operational revenue required for operations, reserve contribution, and a debt financing. So any growing the number of units by 50 or 100, those are all the affordable and market. Our revenue per unit for RGI is not sufficient to support regeneration. So we have to be careful that we don’t add new R GI units to a building that’s expecting affordable market rent.

So if we’re gonna get $500 a unit combined between the city subsidy and the tenant, and we need a thousand for that unit a month, we’ve got it, we’re creating a deficit. So we’re being purposeful in that statement in that if the service manager wants us to increase the RGI account, we’re prepared to do that, but it has to align with the financial plan for that project or regeneration because we can’t absorb sort of lower revenues through RGI without an offset from the municipality. So I just want to be clear. We were committed to 3282.

We’re open to discussions on increasing RGI as long as the funding works for the site. Councilor Ferrer. Thank you for that. I do get that.

Like the report was pretty clear on that too. Like the model clearly from what the report shows , full RGI is not necessarily financially sustainable. So I understand that you have like the mix between affordable and the market rent units. And I understand, you know, with like the aging buildings and everything else, you know, the regeneration money that we’re bringing in is something that we need to do just to make sure that we can actually save those RGI units as well.

I do see also though, like with limber lost, I think I saw the cost range per unit was like 490,000 to like 600-ish, $1,000 for the replacement of the unit as well. So I do see that it’s quite substantial for replacement of a unit in a building. I just wanted to know, is there any, I think I saw also in the report that there could be opportunities, maybe for partnerships or anything like that as well. So I just wanted to know, is that still something that is being considered here for potentially having a cheaper cost per unit for the capital side or a cheaper cost per unit so we can actually maybe increase the RGI portion ?

Mr. Chisholm. So thank you for the question and through the chair. I think one of the challenges I faced myself is the same question of the cost per door.

One of the things you’ll see is that we’re projecting that we’re building family units. So it’s taking out more square footage, it’s more footprint, so to get more units, you have a little bit more cost. So if we look at the cost to build that the target set by the city of London is $280 a square foot. Reimagine Southdale came in lower and our target was $280 a square foot.

So the challenge we’re facing is a lot of our plans include family size units ‘cause we understand from the housing needs assessment, that’s a gap. So as we go for each project, we will reassess the housing need and what is the unit mix that can be successful on that site? Does the data match the reality of the community And we’ll do some adjustments on that on a project-by-project basis to make sure each individual project is able to be self-sufficient. So would that include adding our GI units?

That may be part of the conversation we have with the service manager/shareholder on a condition of funding. But it would have to make sure that we don’t create a situation where the operating revenue is not going to cover debt and reserve in operations. Because when we create that again, that’s the situation the city found itself 20 on 25 years ago when everything was devolved So we don’t want to recreate that in new housing stock. Council for air.

Okay. Thank you for that Yeah, like because when I see the 490,000 like base and then it can go up to six hundred and fifty inch thousand Like that could be the cost of like an existing home And I and I just you know like the numbers they ‘re a little bit, you know, hi And then when I know that we’re kind of not really increasing the RGI component itself 300 million to 1 billion over the next 15 years, you know, like obviously that money is needed at the same time Increasing the affordability factor when we’re putting it in such a significant investment I do feel would be kind of the direction I would like to see going I know there’s another item, so maybe I’ll just leave some more questions for that, but Just considering that there is no new net new RGI being considered here with the full regeneration plan Is that correct mr. Chisholm true the chair. That ‘s correct I will remind you that the affordable rentals are below well below average market rent We’re renting two better units of $1,200 there, you know, so we are Providing a different tier rank year to income is a different program It has a long wait time we’re trying to address the immediate needs of folks that are maybe new to the community or in the community and struggling with their rent today.

So we’re not targeting the deeply affordable but this is definitely affordable. So if you look at what’s on the market to rent renting two and three better units for under $1,600 is quite affordable for for members of our community and that that’s an important segment of folks and they struggle quite a bit, right, because so much of their income is going to rent. So we can serve that tenant group. We serve the community well.

Councillor. >> Okay. Last question then. Just breaking down the affordable and the RGI, because you were saying that the prices are, I guess, comparable.

It could be anyways, depending on who is in the R GI unit. So for affordable units, like what would those ranges actually look like? Mr. Chisholm.

Thank you. And through the chair, you’re challenging my memory a little bit. But I do believe our one bedroom units, we kept that, I think, $960. But the other units itself, Dale, which is our first build, I do believe the numbers range from 12 to 1500 for the two to three bedrooms.

So those are deeply affordable. So essentially when we looked at the CMHC application, 100% of our units were deemed by CMHC as affordable. Councillor? Okay.

Thank you for that. No more questions. Thank you. Councillor Franknecks.

Thank you. I just want to say I appreciate one of the goals being to build lower-energy intensive buildings, better from an operating perspective and long-term financial cost. So I appreciate the thought put into including that as a couple of different pillars throughout the report. One question I did have in regards to the first pillar of retaining and revitalizing existing buildings.

I’m just wondering in buildings that don’t have air conditioning, specifically some of the senior buildings, is there any support given in the near term for seniors to purchase air conditioners, giving the extreme heat waves that we’re seeing? And many of the buildings don’t have centralized air. But of course, I know in the future, hopefully we’ll have some sort of centralized air or air conditioning program. Thank you.

I’ll go to Mr. Chisholm. Thank you and through the chair. We don’t envision a program that we’re purchasing air conditioners for tenants.

It’s problematic in many ways for us, but it is something we think about. So there’s a few things we’re doing. We are, there’s an acronym and it’s not coming to me, but essentially for our makeup air units, we are adding air conditioning to the make up air units, which will be a more energy efficient way to cool some of the existing spaces that have small units, but also it will bring cool air into the hallways and common areas of the buildings, which will reduce some of that heat effect of some of these cinder block and brick buildings we have . So there will be the airflow that goes in in the common areas will be cooler, which will help alleviate some of that.

And we are in conversations about, should we, could we, how do we introduce heat pump systems to a large seniors building? And there’s issues on the capacity of the electrical system to come in and our building to service it, but so we are starting those conversations, recognizing that it is a significant issue you know for low-income households they don ‘t have the few hundred dollars for an air conditioner and sometimes a fan is problematic so we are aware of it we just we haven’t figured out a path and that’s an active conversation for us Council friend thank you yes I appreciate that and appreciate any work that you’re able to bring it forward in BC when they had that heatwave event over 600 people passed away the large majority were seniors so just something to keep up top of mine as you are looking to revitalize those buildings and spaces and I just also wanted to share a surprise to hear some comments about us not learning about the errors from 122 baseline. We actually got an audit report and there are many lessons learned and then we went ahead with 345 Sylvan with those lessons and we opened that over a year ago and I can say as a word counselor of both those buildings I have not heard a single complaint about 345 Sylvan not one single email, phone call, video, social media post, nothing. Why?

Because we learned from 122 baseline, we improved and we changed our policies. So I have every confidence that the city staff and OMCH will take those learnings and continue to apply them in these regeneration plans. Thank you. Looking for other speakers on this item.

Hey, Councillor Trozzo, please go ahead. You have a minute 10. Yeah, just to summarize, I’m still not clear what we’re voting on. We’re just, we’re voting on receiving this report , but not approving it.

When do we approve it? Thank you, Mr. Chisholm. Do you have a timeline when you’re coming back with additional information, or if there’s something coming back to us for approval?

Thank you and through the chair. There is no plan to bring the mastery generation plan to council for approval. It is a board approved document that will guide how we approach regeneration. As the shareholder, any acquisition, divestment of an asset, any acquisition of debt comes through the shareholder.

So the intent would be on a project-by-project basis. As funding becomes available, that we come back and have those conversations and request that approval through council. It is important for us to have a pipeline on a roadmap internally so that we’re prepared to do the work that needed to do. If Bill Cannon Homes announces funding and we do not have a plan, we will not get funding.

It will take us three years to identify the roadmap and get the work done before we can be shovel ready. We are hearing clearly from the funder that 12 months is the window for shovel ready. Our objective is to move these projects along so they’re have already. So should funding become available and should the shareholder and LMCH agree this is a good idea, we’re ready to move forward.

Without a plan, we will not move forward and we will stay and we will continue to just to maintain the assets the best we can. We think it’s prudent to have a plan so that we are able to move forward should funding become available. Councillor Trostin. Yes, well that just underlines why I think it would be irresponsible for us at this point being that we don’t really get to approve this as the sole shareholder and the responsible party here, what else can we do if some of us feel that this report is inadequate in terms of addressing some of the demonstrated problems that we’ve seen already?

So I can’t vote for this and I don’t want to hold up other aspects of moving forward which are very good but we’ve got a very serious problem where people are living and and we can’t just be saying yes, but look over there ‘cause this is nice and we’re gonna move forward. So no, this is just not an acceptable way to make policy and this agency is going to have to do a much better job addressing the conditions in the existing units for this council to continue. Thank you, that’s true. Modeling through, thank you.

Thank you, I have Deputy Mayor Lewis next followed by Councilor Ferrer for a second time. Thank you, Madam Chair, I wasn’t gonna speak, but given the comments we just heard, I have to lay in here. I could not disagree with Council to trust out more strongly. This regeneration plan, which will bring more affordable units online, this is the responsible way.

This is the policy process that’s set out. And it is key that we move this forward in order to qualify for the Build Canada Homes Fund. In terms of the existing unit conditions, as we’ve already heard from our delegation today, improvements are being made. And that didn’t start with this Council, by the way.

I wanna underscore that this started with the Mayor Holder-led Council, making a very significant investment in their multi-year budget for capital funding that allowed LMCH to start moving forward on a number of repairs. That’s included replacing furnaces with high energy efficiency furnaces. That is included replacing doors and windows. That is included replacing elevators.

The improvements are being made. But with all due respect to the Council’s previous comments, you don’t fix 20 years of properties being ignored in two or three years. those efforts take time. And you cannot displace every tenant in the 3,200 plus units we have for an undetermined period of time to make all the repairs necessary in every building all at once.

So respectfully, I found those comments objectionable. I’m gonna support this report and I’m encouraging colleagues to do the same. Thank you, Councilor Ferreira next. Thank you, Chair.

55 seconds remaining. I just wanted to point out some of the reports we had on the placement ratio I did hear some comments on that. In the April 13th CAHPS report, there was information that was brought for the placement ratio, section 2.2.2 for that item on page 10. And it does show the chronological placements decreasing, or sorry, the numbers of people on the wait list decreasing more significantly after the placement ratio changes were enforced in effect from before.

So I just wanted to point that out and you can see that on the April 13th report. Thank you, looking for other speakers. Councillor Pribble. I’ll just make a comment, Deort, as we heard from some of the colleagues, it’s not that we don’t have issues.

We do have them. I do believe we acknowledge them. I do believe this organisation and the board are aware of them. Yes , it doesn’t happen overnight, but bottom line is what I see in front of us is strategically planned forward.

I will absolutely support it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, seeing no other speakers online or in chambers, we will We’ll open the vote.

Building the vote, motion carries, 13 to two. Okay, thank you, Mr. Chisholm. Thank you, Mr.

Squire. This moves us to items for direction. 4.1 similar item, review of the London and Middlesex community housing master regeneration plan, but this is the staff report. I will look for a mover and seconder for this report.

This is in front of us to receive. I have Councilor McAllister and Councillor Cudi. Thank you and we’ll be getting discussion on this item. Councillor Stevenson, I’m happy to go back to you for your question on 4.2 in that report?

That sounds great. Okay, thank you, I’ll go to Councillor Stevenson. Yeah, so my question on 4.2 is what can staff share regarding the application to build Canada homes for capital funding? Thank you, I’ll go to Mr.

Felberg. Thank you, and through you, Madam Chair. So we actually have a report submitted which will be on the next cycle of caps. Thank you, Councillor.

Thank you, so is there a ballpark at all that can be shared with the public, Mr. Felberg? Thank you, through you, Madam Chair. At this point, I think the best thing would be to read that report, it’s quite complex, a lot of details in it, and we can have that conversation at that time.

Thank you, Councillor. Can’t blame a girl for trying. So in the executive summary of this report, it says that this report has been prepared to outline several implications and risks based on civic administration’s review of the plan. Maybe I missed it, but I’m not seeing too much how the guidance is for council to mediate or mitigate those implications and risks.

So I’m just wondering, is that coming later or is there anything that could be highlighted for us here? Thank you, I’ll go to Mr. Murray first. Sure, thank you and through you Madam Chair.

So I will speak to I guess the financial risks and we’ve outlined a number of considerations in the report that I think is important context to be mindful of and aware of looking ahead. Certainly we anticipate that there will be future funding requests from LMCH as it pertains to this plan as part of the 2028 to 2031 multi-year budget. And some of the considerations, all of the considerations that we’ve outlined here would be important and useful, I guess reminders to be mindful of at that point in time around the implications in particular that any such investments would have, for example, on the city’s debt situation and how that might impact the overall debt picture for the city. So this is, I think, a long-term plan that will have multiple touch points with council and I think these are good risks to be mindful of into the future as future funding requests come forward.

Councillor Stevenson. Thank you. In the chart provided in table one is one 20, where does one 22 baseline fall in that chart? Mr.

Felberg. Thank you, Madam Chair and through you. One 22 baseline is an affordable housing project, so it’s not actually included in that table. Councillor Stevenson.

Okay, thank you. And then at the very end of 2.1, it talks about tenant success. And the staff report says, tenant success is an important outcome that could be more clearly reflected in the plan. While the plan appropriately emphasizes financial sustainability and alignment with the expectations of the LMCH Board and City Council, it may benefit from a more balanced articulation of how tenant success will be supported and measured.

This could include clearer reference to elements such as housing stability, tenant engagement, safety and security, access to supports, successful tendencies, responsiveness to tenant needs, and improved quality of life. So I couldn’t agree with this more. My question is, if LMCH was in discussions with city staff throughout 2025, why is it not more clearly reflected in the plan? Mr.

Felberg. Thank you, through you, Madam Chair. So the conversations, most of the conversations that we had in relation to the plan were focused on the redevelopment development opportunities. A lot of the physical activities like the acquisition and some of the things that Mr.

Chisholm identified. When the final plan came forward, this was a gap that we’d identified, and it’s a suggestion that we have for LNCH that could improve the plan further to some of the other Councillor’s comments as well. Councillor Stevenson. Yeah, thank you.

My comment would be though, we’re not addressing the like elephant in the room. Like there’s one thing that is having a huge, huge impact on everything. And we’re still not talking about it. I fail to understand how it’s not a top priority.

On page 352 it talks about how a future request to be funded through debt We’re not included in the debt forecasts in the 2026 budget update Which highlighted the projected growth in the city’s debt burden I just wondered if staff had any comments around that again, I guess this is coming in the next report, but Like will will there be updated debt forecasts with whatever is coming to us next month. Thank you I’ll go to mr. Murray Thank you and through you, Madam Chair. What that refers to is the debt implications of any future projects or funding requests that come from LMCH pertaining to this plan, this regeneration plan.

So we would envision that through the multi-year budget, there will be a potentially a business case that comes forward and there may well be debt associated with that plan. this is referring to the fact that that debt is obviously not captured or reflected in our forecast at this point because we do not know what that looks like in terms of the amount of the debt, the term of the debt, that sort of thing. So that is what that point is referring to. Councillor.

Thank you for that. I guess what I’m wondering is when the decision point comes to council about an acquisition plan and potentially the build Canada homes, if there’s debt involved, will there be forecast debt forecast updates for us to consider at the same time? Mr. Murray.

Thank you. Three, Madam Chair. So we typically refresh our debt forecasts once a year. So certainly as we’re developing each year’s multi-year budget or budget update, as the case may be, we’re updating our debt forecasts and projections as well.

Certainly we could use that most recent refresh to then layer on what the impacts could hypothetically be associated with any debt that may come with a future funding request. Councilor? Thank you. I think that would be really helpful.

Maybe one of your graphs again , we can see the impact of our decision points. Right below that on page 352, it talks about the intention of the plan being to generate additional revenues, but if the revenues don’t materialize as planned, LMCH could realize an operating deficit. Now we saw that at 122 baseline, we’re seeing that many of the community housing providers as you do the new end of year mortgages and that kind of thing and toll puddle. So is there any kind of a risk assessment model or anything that is going to be provided to council as we make these decisions?

Because I hate for us to like an intention is good, but it would also be nice to know what we can do to ensure or at least how readily we council would be informed of the impacts right because again if I look at 122 baseline it took an audit report a long time later to realize that we were there were financial implications to taxpayers because of that so knowing that this is being highlighted now how proactively can civic administration inform council of anything untoward that’s going on. Go to Mr. Murray. Thank you, three, Madam Chair.

So as it relates to future requests that may come from LMCH, I think what will be important for Council to understand is the sensitivity analysis that LMCH has undertaken as it pertains to any particular project that is being put forward for potential funding. Obviously the intention would be that these are self-sufficient developments in the sense that any additional debt requirement to fund them can be covered by additional rental revenues. But certainly there is a sensitivity analysis that needs to accompany that to ensure that we’re not cutting it too close as it relates to projections and pro formas on those developments. So I think there’s an important concept of margin of safety that needs to be built into those projections And it would be, I think, important that as part of those future requests that LMCH articulate the sensitivity analysis that has been done in those projections.

Councillor? Yeah, thank you for that, because, again, the intention is great, 122 baseline had a great intention about being an affordable housing building. And I think it’s really — it was sad to see the loss of that highly affordable, deeply affordable rental units in such a short period of time, right. So city built, city run, city managed, and the rents went up significantly in just a short period of time.

So I’d hate to see that here. We really want to keep the rents as low as possible. And if LMCH is raising them up to market rent to keep things financially sustainable, I think it’s really important that council understands what is happening to the rents. And then it talks about LMCH considering the priority of the projects on the roster about a wise use of limited funds and rehabilitation.

So if I could just ask for an update on that like it says and I’ll go to staff for an update. Thank you. Three amount of chair. So I think what we’re really driving out there is this is this is a significant plan as you’ve seen in London the report 300 million projected over five years upwards of a billion over 15 years.

Resources are going to be limited. Council will have to future councils will have to make some decisions in terms of priorities, in terms of not just funding LMCH potential requests, but requests from civic service areas and other agencies, boards and commissions as well. So, resources are not unlimited. And there will need to be some prioritization that happens as a result of that.

And therefore, You know, it’s possible that not all projects will be able to be funded on the timeline that we ‘d ideally like to see them move forward, right? So I think that prioritization of what projects can have the best bang for the buck and bring those forward and prioritize those ones Will be important given the limited resources that will inevitably be available. Thank you I will look for other speakers on item 4.1. I’ve Councillor Chauceau next and Councillor Ferrer Thank you, and through the chair, going to 2.2 overview of the Master Regeneration Plan, which we’ve received, though not approved.

It says the first one is retain and revitalize existing buildings. But then the subtitle Development and Redevelop ment to subtitle acquisition, you talk about completion of Southdale, Redevelopment of Ladybrook, Development of Baconlands and Strathroy, Rede velopment, Work for the Limber Loist property. Where does this report actually address the risks that are involved in that first, and I’m coming back to that first lever, the risks involved in that retain and revitalize existing buildings? Because when I read this report, just like reading the the plan itself where it falls short and where I have very concerns about is is it doesn’t really address that first lever again it talks about the it talks about all the other things that are going on it doesn’t talk about the first lever and I think it’s a blind spot we’re just not dealing with this and I think that we we we we we ‘re not dealing with this and And every year we don’t deal with this.

The problem is getting bigger. It is going to blow up. There are serious liabilities that we could be facing due to poor conditions in buildings and also due to the deleterious effect that the deleterious effect has— So moment, Councillor, while I hear the point of order, Councillor McAllister, go ahead. I think we’re straying a bit here and my point of order refers to, I feel like there’s an accusation in there that the board is not doing its due diligence, their liability concerns, and I take issue with that because I think that raises serious legal accusations in terms of the board not doing its work.

So I would ask that the councilor attract that statement, the board is aware of issues, we’re dealing with them, and I think you’re crossing a line. Just a moment. Let me rephrase that. Just a moment, councilor, just a moment please.

Thank you, Councillor Trass will ask you to re phrase. Well, in light of the fact that the bullets in 2.2 included is the first one, retain and revitalize existing buildings. Could you point to the point in the report where it actually deals with that first lever? Thank you, I’ll go to Mr.

Felberg. Thank you, and through you Madam Chair. So it’s true the report does not deal specifically with the retain and revitalize existing buildings , but the perspective on that is that City Council is invested through the Coachee program. They’ve invested in capital repairs at LMCH, very specifically as its own particular line within the Coachee Investment Plan.

Additionally, LMCH has also received CMHC funding in order to undertake a number of capital repairs . And through the Asset Management Plan, which identified a hundred million dollar gap, and as Ms. Chisholm said, needs a bit of an update in order to reflect more current day activities and the work that’s been going on. What we focused on in the report was really the redevelopment because of the cost of that redevelopment and the potential impact to municipal council and the multi-year budget in future years.

Yes, thank you. - Thank you. Just a moment, Councillor, please go ahead. Yeah, so I think what is clearly happening here in my view, and I hope this doesn’t offend anybody, We’re moving forward with redevelopment, refurb ishment, acquisition on a couple of particular lands, but we’re not dealing with the condition of the premises in a responsible way as they are now.

And I say that really having thought about the condition of these units based on the asset management plan and based on what I’m hearing from not only residents in the building, but neighbors. it’s really a problem, and I think that we are, and I’m sorry, I’m gonna say this. We’re not being responsible if we gloss over the problems in the building. Just a moment, Councilor— Point of order.

Point of order, I have two point of orders. I will start with Councilor McAllister. Yes, anecdotal evidence. Councilor has heard is one thing, but again, I point to the Board being aware of issues and dealing with them, and I would like the Councilor to be cautious with his language in terms of the accusations that we are not doing something.

We are, and it’s being handled, appropriate and responsibly. Thank you, Deputy Mayor Lewis, where’s your point of order similar? It’s similar, although I have different concerns to raise with you, so if you wanna deal with that one first, then come to me, or would you like mine too, and then you can rule on them together. I’ll take you, I’ll take you and start.

Thank you, I will take each separately. Councillor McAllister, I hear your point of order . I have cautioned the Councillor already and asked to rephrase. I’m just asking the Councillor again if he can just continue to think about rephrasing the way that he is positioning his points.

Thank you, I’ll do that. I’m trying to think about how— I’m just gonna hear the second point of order. Deputy Mayor Lewis. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Frankly, I think the comment that we are not being responsible actually serves to undermine decisions of council and would be a violation of council code of conduct. It is a matter of opinion based on, as Councillor McAllister has said, and total evidence at best. And it’s also weighing into the operational leads . The retention and revitalization of buildings, and I spoke to this earlier, is very much operational in terms of when pieces of that are done and is not relevant to this report.

And so the Councilor is also out of order in terms of not sticking with the item that we are dealing with in terms of the agenda here. I think his conduct has been frankly in my opinion reprehensible. Okay. Councillor.

I need to take a personal privilege on that. I need to make a point. One moment, please. One moment, please.

Councillor. Councillor. I do not want to have to cut off microphones. Deputy Mayor Lewis, let me deal with your point of order.

Just a moment. I’ll reinforce my caution, and I will ask you to stay on topic. I agree that we’re veering into other areas, and with that, I’ll let you continue on your comments. Thank you.

I don’t think, Mike, I do want to take a point of personal privilege on the reprehensible. I mean, I’m reading this report and I’m trying to give my honest assessment of what’s not included. And so just to give you, preserve your time as well and to keep you on the topic at hand, you’re asking for me to deal with your point of order around term, reprehensible. I hear you.

I will again let Deputy Mayor Lewis know that I agree that that was a bit overboard and that I will ask for everyone to maintain decorum and I think this is just a reminder for everyone with that. to return to your comments, so go ahead. Okay, so my comments are really based on commenting about what’s not in the report, which I think needs to be in the report. And I’m very disappointed, I’m very disappointed, and I think it creates problems for the city for us to not deal with these issues.

And you can characterize them as operational issues. But I think the condition of the premises that the tenants are living in, goes way beyond operational issues. And I think I’ve made my point, I can see with the mood of several people when this council is, I’ll certainly be raising these issues again, backed up by certain motions at the shareholders meeting, but for now I have to say, I’m particularly frustrated, and I just do not think that these reports deal with the conditions of the building. Thank you.

Thank you. I will look for other speakers on this item. My councilor, at Councilor Ferrara next, yes, go ahead. Thanks, Chair.

Before I ask my questions, I will, I guess, make comment to the Chair’s comments. We must maintain our decorum. Like we’re the leaders of the city and we need to act like the leaders of the city. And I’m not taking any sides.

I’m just saying, we need to start working as one as a unit and I know we can do that ‘cause I’ve seen us do that before. So let’s see if we can do that here. This is a big item, this is very important. And I feel like these are the times when we really need to start working together.

For my question, for this item, if we were to approve this to staff, would we be expecting this as a receipt here of this report? Would this be coming to the multi-year budget? Would this be kind of an action that council, if they take, we will see business cases regarding this on a multi-year budget process, or will we be seeing potential funding reports coming before that time? Thank you, I’ve got a Mr.

Murray. Thank you and three, Madam Chair. So I think there’s an important step that precedes the multi-year budget, and that is of course Council’s strategic planning process. So there needs to be some decisions made through that process around the, what the priorities of the next term of council are.

And so pending that discussion and then pending associated discussions at the LMCH board of directors level around how they then contribute to these studies. Strategic objectives for the next term, that would then inform what LMCH chooses to bring forward through the next multi-year budget process. Councilor Peratt. Okay, with that, because our strategic plan right now does fit into this direction in a lot of ways.

Does that mean we could potentially see recommendations or perhaps funding if it were to become available before that time? Mr. Murray. Thank you.

Through you Madam Chair, I will refer back to Mr. Felberg’s previous comments on submissions for potential build Canada homes funding, which further details will of course be forthcoming on that that may provide an avenue to access funding sooner than that. of course, as you know, just very recently in the last couple of months, LMCH received approval to enter into the loan agreement with CM HC to secure funding for Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Reimagine Southdale. As part of that approval, Council also allowed L MCH to retain the previously approved municipal dollars that went along with that project, so that provides some additional funding.

The neighbor of approximately 29 million dollars were there abouts to To advance to the next phase of their regeneration plan as well So all that to say there is funding that has been approved already that will allow LMCH to progress regeneration activities over the next couple years in the lead-up to the multi- year budget Council for era. Okay. Thank you. So with the last one my last I guess follow up on that I understand we have some funding that’s been approved or is going to get approved for the lead up to the multi-year budget So, the question would be, if the full scope or breadth of the regeneration plan as it is in front of us, parts of it or anything after what’s been approved already doesn’t necessarily get funded, let’s say it doesn’t get approved or funded, what does the plan be?

Is there going to be kind of a focus on repairing existing units? Is there going to be anything else that comes up that we could take a direction on? I’m just wondering what happens if our plans right now don’t necessarily materialize? Mr.

Murray. Thank you through you. So as Mr. Ch isholm alluded to in his comments, there are multiple strategies or prongs that LMCH is working through.

One of them being, of course, the regeneration plan, the asset management plan, of course, informs the ongoing lifecycle renewal requirements as well for the existing assets of LMCH. So I’m not going to speculate on what LMCH would choose to prioritize or put forward as part of the next multi-year budget, other than to say that there are multiple strategies that they are working through. Councillor? Okay, thank you for that.

No more questions? Thank you, I will look for other speakers on this item, be on line. Okay, seeing none, oh, Councillor Pribble, go ahead. I’ll just leave it with a comment and to a stated in the conclusion by our staff that this is a plan forward.

are there going to be certain challenges? Yes, there will be, which there will be addressed prior in the next council strategic plan and also the multi-year budget. So therefore, yes, there will be risks, which will be addressed at a proper time. As every other organization, it will be up to the board of directors in that organization to prioritize what’s the best, do we need a plan to move forward?

Absolutely, I will be supporting it. thank you okay seeing no other speakers on this item online or in chambers we’ll open the vote closing the vote motion carries 13 to 2 okay thank you committee i’m in your hands uh our next item 4.2 is probably going to take some time i’m looking to you as to whether or not you’d like a 10-minute break now okay i’ll look for a mover or whatever time you choose to put forward okay i have council Councilor Proville moving a 10 minute break, looking for a seconder. I have Councilor Frank moving that break and we’ll do this by hand, all in favor and those for online if you can put your cameras on. Emotion carries.

Okay, thank you. We have 10 minutes. There are some snacks in the break room. Okay, we are going to come back from our break.

We’ll have everyone take their seats. Thank you. Okay, we are now on item 4.2, which is the London Transit Commission Governance Review Findings and Recommendation. I will first go to Ms.

Stater’s Bear to provide some preliminary comments and an introduction to Mr. Pever, who will be our speaker. Go ahead. Thank you, Madam Chair, three of the members of the committee.

As committee is aware, Council directed civic administration to undertake a governance review of the London Transit Commission. What you will hear today is a response back from KPMG, who we consulted with as long as well as dealing consulting who led this work. Bruce Pevers is here with us today. He’s a partner with KPMG and he works in cities with cities of higher education institutions and he’s actually from London.

So we’re happy to welcome him here today. We had another partner with him. Mr. Cameron had to leave so we’ll leave it to Mr.

Pevers to walk us through this presentation. Wonderful. Thank you. Welcome, Mr.

Pevers. We will get you all set up there and you may begin when you’re ready. Great. Thank you, Madam Chair.

It’s a pleasure to be here in London again to present our findings from the Governance Review on London Transit. I’d like to begin, Madam Chair, to bring Council on the date on what were the objectives and the scope for our engagement. So we were engaged in collaboration with our partner, Dylan Consulting, to conduct an independent governance review on the London Transit Commission. The review assessed how effectively the current governance model supports accountability, transparency, and coordinated decision-making with Council’s strategic priorities for transit.

So we wanted to draw upon individual input and leading practices from comparable municipalities to inform the development of a modernized governance model for the city and London transit. So the key objectives, there are two of them, one was to assess the current governance relationship between the city and LTC, and the second one was to recommend a governance model that promotes alignment with Council’s strategic priorities, strengthens accountability, and supports effective coordinated transit oversight. In order to achieve those objectives, we assess the current governance framework, we engage key individuals to understand perspectives on governance and opportunities for improvement. We conducted a jurisdictional review and we developed three different models to look at for the city’s consideration.

The summary of our findings around governance was one , the London Transit Commission has a solid monitoring foundation for business planning and your reporting and effective working-level relationships. However, we found the reporting to be inconsistent. There’s issues around the decision-making process in order to support Council’s oversight of its priorities, risks, trade-offs, and how you implement different projects. There is also a finding around while the by-law establishes formal roles for Council and the London Transit Commission.

accountability is not always consistency consistently applied in practice. There’s also a finding around authority. So the governance structure appropriately assigns council authority over funding and policy direction and the London Transit Commission authority over operations. However, what we found was that decision-making and escalation pathways are not always clearly defined or consistently used.

And finally there is a finding around alignment. So both the Transit Commission and the City are generally aligned at the strategic planning level but there is some alignment issues during the implementation due to funding constraints, competing priorities, and operational pressures. If we look at the three different models we considered, I’ll start with option Number three and work backwards. So we looked at option three, which is a municipal services corporation and municipal service corporations are being rolled out across the province for a variety of reasons.

There’s also option two, which was to bring London Transit back into the city as a city department. And finally, there was option one, which was to retain the status quo, but with improvements, namely a commission structure. So what you see before you is the recommended model. So what changes a more structured reporting relationship with the city and the London transit commission, which will promote greater council visibility.

What remains is a dedicated governance and operational continuity, okay? So as I stated earlier, City Council as the funding agent is responsible for strategic priority and funding and the London Transit Commission is responsible for operations and thank you if you just want to wrap up and we will wrap up right now with we have six opportunities or recommendations for you and involve both the composition of the Commission responsibilities how Council and the Transit Commission report governance training for the commission. The alignment was the city’s strategic plan and finally how to develop greater strategic capacity within the commission. Madam Chair, that is our presentation.

Thank you. Okay, I will look to committee for a motion to receive and there was a motion included in our package. It included the recommendations from the governance review, endorsing those civic administration be directed to prepare and bring forward to a future meeting of SBPC, any necessary amendments to bylaws that LTC be directed to review the recommendations and that civic administration be authorized to undertake all the administrative acts that are necessary in connection with this report . So I’m looking for a mover and a seconder so that we can begin our discussion.

I’ve Councillor Frank and Councillor Hopkins and I will look for speakers. I’ll start with Councillor Stephenson, go ahead. Sorry, if we could just get your mic on. Thank you and thank you for the presentation.

I go right to the overall conclusion, which you stated is that the issues identified are governance execution issues, not evidence that the commission model is fundamentally unsuitable. And I just think it’s a little bit unfortunate that we didn’t make sure that we were executing what we currently had before we paid for a review . But I do think that we maximize the value of this review if we apply it to other things that we do as well. ‘Cause there’s that expression that says how you do anything is how you do everything to a certain degree.

And I think these issues are showing up in other areas of the city. And so having this reminder of what it looks like to execute the governance function that we have, I think will is a way to maximize the use of this report. So it talks about accountability, not always being consistently applied in practice with role ambiguity, unclear ownership of issue resolution and decision making and escalation pathways are not always clearly defined or consistently used creating uncertainty and reliance on informal resolution. So I appreciated the clarity and the conclusion and the succinctness of that.

I think it sums it up pretty well in that it was a governance execution issue and something we can learn from. You just mentioned, as you were doing the overview, a more structured reporting and council visibility. And again, I’ve been a big advocate for more reporting, more structured reporting, and more visibility on the issues that matter to Londoners, so transit being a big one of those. And in number three of your recommendations, you’re saying again, improve the reporting structure, increase the reporting frequency to council, to strengthen reporting clarity, improve transparency, and enable more proactive decision-focused oversight by counsel.

I could read that 10 times. I love that. I think I would love to see us embrace that, take this, given that it is a governance review and the conclusion was an execution issue. I think, you know, it’s a great opportunity for us to apply this in as many areas as we can because we’re not getting the results that we want a lot of cases and we are the governance body and we do have a lot more authority I think than we are utilizing.

I’ve heard terms when I talk about our boards and commissions and wanting to get certain things. We’ve heard terms say like, oh, we don’t want to micromanage them. We’re allocating taxpayer funding to these boards and agencies. We set them up.

We structured them and they should do what we say to a certain degree, especially when comes to best practices. In terms of reporting, transparency, we had an issue at the Hamilton Road BIA around bank signatures. And again, it came up, “Oh, we can’t direct or micromanage a BIA.” And I think, well, we allocate taxpayer funding, something as basic as cash controls. Just a moment, Councillor Stevenson, I’m just pa using your time while I hear the point of order from Councillor Palazzar.

All right, Madam Chair, I appreciate other agency boards and commissions, including the London police and BIA’s, but if we just keep it on topic of the LTC is us report that’s in front of us for governance and this decision. Thank you. Thank you. I will remind the speaker just to keep tight onto the report.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, as I pointed out, given that the learning of this over $100,000 expenditure from taxpayers is about governance best practices, the best way to maximize the value is to talk about how we can use it elsewhere. the last thing I just want to say is again in the implementation considerations and I’m just reiterating what’s in this report I do really appreciate the report and as I said I think the value comes in spreading it across everything this council does that successful implementation will require sequencing, resourcing and sustained governance discipline and that one of the quick wins that’s recommended is to prioritize reporting improvements.

So whether this is contracted agencies whether it’s boards and commissions. I really I’m going to bring back this this report and I’m going to mention it as we look at other things that we’re doing to say hey let’s apply these best practices let’s you know have sustained governance discipline across this corporation and I think that’s the best way to maximize the value that we spend here. Thank you for the report and and I did appreciate it. Thank you, I had Councilor Perbal next.

Thank you, sir, the chair. Thank you as well for the report that I certainly agree with your recommendations and with your evaluation of the current status and future. I do have a question though. When we look at recommended model, what changes?

And there are clear roles, I see that. Decision rights and escalation. Can you go more into the details based on the model that you are proposing that is gonna be different and what we have currently. Thank you about a Mr.

Chairman. Madam Chair to the Councillor. So thank you. So decision rights revolve around how decisions are made in the organization and what we’re suggesting in our recommendations that they become more formalized.

So Councillor, in my work with municipalities across the country, I’ve discovered the saying that good paper makes good business. And what we’re suggesting here with our decision rights is that the reporting relationships and how decisions are communicated across organizations are formalized and papered. So that everybody has a clear understanding of who is responsible, who is accountable, and who is ultimately tasked with delivering the outcome. I hope that answers your question, Madam Mayor to the Councillor.

Thank you, I’ll go back to Councilor Pervall. Sorry, and the follow-up through the chair and the part of the escalation. Thank you, I’ve got a Mr. Peaver.

Yes, so with respect to escalation, when there is roadblocks encountered within the relationship between the two entities, then how do you progress to an ultimate decision? How does it get escalated? And again, that should be papered and agreed to formally. Okay, so it’s not totally, it’s the model, it’s just the process in this case, because both of them, what you mentioned, it’s not the model, model, currently what we have , this could be implemented as well, immediately, correct?

Mr. Peaver? Yes, Madam Chair, to the Councillor. Yes, this is our recommendations, as we have detailed in the report, can begin implementation upon Council’s adoption consideration.

Councillor Per beau? Okay, thank you, follow-up. When I look at a recommended model, and when I see, besides the Peter City Manager Executive Team and LTC General Manager Leadership Team, and it is dotted line. Can you put a little bit more support of this?

Because again, when I see, even though it’s a dotted line, this is kind of a thing that if I look at this model, City Council the moment where the information doesn’t flow through the City Council in this how do we prevent that the deputy city manager executive team is not blamed or ltc commission through the other hand and this is the thing if you can explain to me the dotted line so we have a clear vision on this part mr peter so madam chair to the counselor typically what we recommend is that staff between two entities between a city and one of its boards, such as the London Transit Commission, they are responsible for operational delivery under Council’s guidance and policy direction. Accordingly, they would consult with one another. So they would on operational matters, it would be the city manager’s office or the city’s executive team that would be communicating and working with the executive team of London Transit. When it involves policy and strategic priorities, then it becomes a matter for Council and Council is ultimately responsible for strategy and strategic priorities as the funder and as the overall body holding the London Transit Commission.

That said, in our recommendations we’re suggesting that the board be made up of four Councillors and three representatives so that you have a knowledge-based board and therefore it would be our expectation that Council would consult so the dotted line with the Commission around strategic priorities for transit in the city. Councillor Perbault. Thank you for that and actually I’m going to go the staff after you heard this explanation of the dotted line between you the executive team and LTC general manager and leadership team. Is your understanding clear and do you see as proposed in this model working well?

I will go to staff whoever wants to jump in and looks like Ms. Cher, go ahead. Thank you Madam Chair. As a sponsor for this review I’m happy to answer our understanding of it.

I think staff to staff with LTC in the cities work quite well when we’ve we’ve had major projects to work on, or when we’re dealing with something pressing. What this provides an opportunity for us to do is have a more proactive strategic relationship and ensure that communications between staff and the commission respectively at LTC and staff and committee and council here are addressing and bringing those matters forward . So I think for staff, yes, it is reasonably clear . There’ll be a bit of work to do together as part of an implementation plan, which is one of the recommendations.

It’s shown here in the staff recommendation as being LTC work. My perspective is it’s collaborative work with L TC, and it’s actually the foundation of that dotted line, is how we define the implementation and actual ization of the recommendations here, and bring them back respectfully to the commission and council. Councilor Provost. Perfect, thank you, I’m very happy to hear that .

And the last thing I have actually, it’s the timelines. By the way, I completely agree with the strategic capacity and the big picture vision. I know in terms of I always like to look within the existing team, instead of creating a new position. I hope that, again, when I look at the timelines, I hope the team will be looking, if this is implemented, that they will be looking, making these changes immediately.

But in terms of the number five and number six, the refined strategic outlook at planning six to 12 months and enhance strategic capacity over 12 months, those are two frames that for me, I would say, are almost non-acceptable if you wanna move forward. And this is kind of your suggestion recommendation or based on the experiences with other municipalities because in a normal corporate world, these timelines would be very long and unacceptable. Can you please comment on those and what’s your recommendation? Mr.

Peaver. Madam Chairman, to the Councillor, the recommended implementation timelines are based upon best practices with other municipalities. The city is fully capable, or I don’t know if Capal, my apologies is the right word. Madam Chairman, but within your rights to speed up or slow down the implementation plan as fits your needs.

Council approval? Thank you very much, no more questions at this time. Okay, thank you. Have Councilor Ferreira next.

Thank you, Chair. So I found this report quite constructive, I guess, as a step forward. Like as a Councillor who sat on the previous commission as a Councillor who was also on Council. The main thing that I was finding was that there was challenges that existed in the relationship between the Commission and Council.

And I found that a lot of the ambiguities that kind of existed there kind of resulted in those challenges for the relationship. And that’s exactly what I was kind of saying right at the beginning. So I do really appreciate how that was highlighted in the report. I do understand that, you know, formalizing the roles and formalizing the governance and formalizing communication responsibility and accountability really kind of will help us kind of you know guide us to make sure that when it comes to execution we can stay within the priorities of the city and we can also make sure that we have a service that operationally speaking is able to provide what people are looking for when it comes to our transit to our public transit so I really appreciate that.

Some of the challenges that I saw, like when we were trying to bring through the 10,000 hours for specialized transit at the board, there was challenges there. And with the smart card readers with the online booking, like I experienced it all. Even with the training , we did try to bring training to the commission at the time. So I really appreciate that that training is incorporated here because I really think that was the level we had to go to make sure that we can have these formal rails to make sure that this relationship can be constructive and can be collaborative between the two entities.

So I really appreciate all that . So with the recommendations, I’m fairly okay with them. I do have some questions with some of them, though. I understand, you know, when having now there’s a recommendation for a council majority commission.

And I do understand that in the report, it does say that, you know, we’re trying to steer away from Ward specific, I guess, directions, and we’re trying to steer away from that. But and we’re kind of answering that with the training manual that we’re bringing through, as well. I wanted to ask, though, when we come to, I guess, the balance between a majority of council, how are we going to ensure that within the training manual, or if there’s any other mechanisms that are available to ensure that we do stay citywide in the approach when you have a majority of council on the new commission? How would we, is it only within the training manual, or will there be any other, I guess, mechanisms that would ensure that a citywide approach, a transit-wide approach, exists.

Thank you. I’ve got a Mr. Peaver. Madam Chair, to the Councillor, perhaps the staff might be able to better answer that question, given we’re fairly focused on our scope of work.

Thank you, I’ve got a Mr. Chair. Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m going to maybe extrapolate some work, I do some other boards to this one that members who sit as part of the London Transit Commission sit there wearing a hat as a representative of the commission, not as a representative of their ward or city council, but when they’re bringing that knowledge and experience to the system that serves the entirety of London.

So that will be something that is encompassed in the training and onboarding and expectations around roles. And that is generally the way most boards work is when you sit at a board and hold more than one function that you would be, say in the case of our here on your water boards, which I know well, you are there as a representative of the board to make the best decisions for the collective performance of those boards assets, systems and staff and customers. Thank you. I’ll go back to Councilor Ferreira.

Okay, thank you for that. I guess speaking along the same lines, for me, I’m always trying to depoliticize as much as I can because I feel like that lies some of the issues. So I like the balance that we’re bringing in because I know we have to make sure that we have a city strategic direction. And I like how the chair will be a counselor and the vice chair will be a member of the public .

So I guess I would follow up with a question on the, I guess, the appointments and how we do the appointments. So when we’re looking for appointments for the citizen portions of the commission, is, was there a consideration where we could have maybe the striking committee as we did before kind of really set forward recommendations when it comes to council making the final appointment for those public positions to show that these citizens fit the requirements, they fit, they have a lived experience, or they have expertise or institutional knowledge in this area, are we gonna have a striking committee when it comes to those citizen appointments that really kind of recommends, like these are the individuals that we really think would serve the best on the commission going forward. Thank you, I’ll go to Ms. Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The council is getting perhaps a bit ahead of where we are on this one, and that these would be things we will define in the implementation plan that will come back to you, and we will be looking at the best mechanism, working with the city clerk’s office to lead that process to ensure that we’re seeing a representation for the public appointees that reflect either specialized skills or lived experience and knowledge. Thank you, I’ll go back to Councilor Ferrer. Okay, thank you for that.

Sorry for getting a little ahead on that. I would really like to see that though. And I guess I would also maybe if I can make a suggestion or recommendation, a specific area for someone with institutional knowledge or lived experience when it comes to the specialized transit portion as well. think that would be very important because we really benefited very well when we had members of the public who had that knowledge.

I guess I would go to the escalation process. I wanted to know like I understand that there’s going to be somewhat of an escalation process for disputes or anything like that when it comes between the commission and council. I just wanted to know who would own that? Like where would that fall?

Who would be the overseer? If I could thank you. Just Councillor, you have 30 seconds. Go ahead and start.

My apologies through you. And I think the question is obviously in a relationship, both parties are responsible to ensure that there ‘s, where there is conflict, we would work it out together. So depending on the nature through UMAM chair to the Councillor, I think the city would obviously have that responsibility. Those are the kind of things that we can build through our discussions with LTC moving forward.

But the intent is obviously to develop a robust way of developing or ensuring that we are addressing concerns moving forward. It could be us, it could be them, it could be a combination thereof, depending upon the issue. Councilor Ferrer. Did you say 30 seconds?

30 seconds. Okay, then I’ll just try to say this one last question. When it comes to the senior manager for strategy and relationship role, I see that that’s reporting to the LTC. Was there any consideration that that could, and I know this might make things complicated, but can be reporting to both the city and the LTC at the same time?

Thank you, I will go to Ms. Chair. Thank you, Madam Chair. I think it would be very difficult from an employment perspective for them to be an employee of both organizations as the staff of LTC are separate from the staff of the city of London.

That said, I think that that rate relationship will be very critical and work very closely with the city of London staff. Seven seconds, Councillor Ferrer. Okay, well, I’ll support the recommendation. I really feel like this is giving kind of the guidelines that we need in really formalizing the relationship.

So, I guess your time. Thank you, I have Councillor Hopkins next. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you very much for the presentation.

At first, when I thought we were gonna do the governance review, I was unsure if we needed to do this, but reading the report, a lot of good information , a lot of guidance going forward. So I do appreciate a number of suggestions. I wanted to sort of maybe underline the things that stood out for me and what I confirmed for me, the training that is needed and in the composition, it all kind of comes together. But also the public, the three members from the public, and having that accessibility lens, I do appreciate comments from the public that we’ve received on this report.

We have someone up here in the gallery as well as another comment. I think that is a really important part of the composition as well, of the board. It’s just not the Councillors. It’s also the public.

How we come together. I also appreciate Ms. Shear’s comments around the composition structure and the collaboration between the city and LTC and how we can work with that. and I love those little markings around the option where we’re looking at the commission structure with improvements, but I think it’s greater than that and I think there’s a lot more to come.

So again, wanna thank you for sort of, I think making us all understand where we need to go with the board and thank you again for the presentation. Thank you, looking for other speakers. Councilor Trossa. Thank you.

Through the chair, I just wanted to express my support for this report and my deep gratitude to the consultants for the thoughtful methodology they used that included looking at other jurisdictions as well as doing a , you know, sometimes difficult assessment of where we’ve been. This is not the position that I started with. And as I read the report And as I reread it again, I came to the conclusion that taking it further at this point would indeed involve some things that we might not be ready to do and some risks and some organizational challenges. So while I very much believe in the underlying premise of this report and also the fact that we needed to do this, we really needed to do this , I know people are going to say this was an expensive report.

I don’t have a problem with the value of the report that we received for the money. I think we received good value. There are a couple of minor things that having said that. There are a few minor things that I’d like to tweak.

I don’t think that has to be done today, but I just want to highlight two of them. Number one, in terms of the makeup of the non-council members of the committee. We have a lot of professional expertise on staff. And the professional expertise on staff on things like auditing, personnel management, understanding the transit environment are things that we could supplement on the staff.

For me, what the most important role of the other members is the lived experience that transit riders have in terms of being, people need to be able to help us answer the question, why are people not taking transit more? We’re seeing a decrease in ridership. I mean, this is just very important. I like the way that the report was ultimately drafted and I would not offer any amendment at this point because I think you’ve left it flexible enough that we can work that out.

Certainly with respect to the disabled community, there has to be a representative. But on a four to three board, there are two others, and I think there’s some latitude there, but it has to really focus on the experience of our riders. The other thing, and I think, Councillor Ferris touched on this, and I think the idea of having a communications and liaison officer is a good idea. It’s badly needed.

However, and I understand the deputy city manager ‘s reluctance to try to create a blended position from a funding and financing and reporting a challenge. But I think it would be very important to at least have an understanding that the person in this role has a bit of arm’s length latitude to sometimes say things that might not be a direct result of what they were told by their supervisor. I think it’s very important to have that independent arms-length relationship, at least to some degree. This is gonna be a very challenging position, the liaison communications person, and they need to be able to have the independence to be able to reach across to the other agency, where there are going to be challenges.

We did this when we were dealing with the mobility master plan. So it was a special project. I think a step went out of the way to do this. This has to be regularized into everything we do.

Other than that, I’m very happy with the report. I thank you for it and I’m looking forward to, we have to do quite a bit of work in terms of how we’re gonna implement this. So I think by adopting these recommendations, we’re not writing a whole lot into stone right now other than this is the direction that we’re going in. And in closing, I just want to say, I think that this report adds a lot to where we ‘ve been.

And I know there’s a tendency to make the claim, well, this is just repeating what we were always going to do, but I do think that this report, there’s so much depth in this report that I think it does add a number of layers of a breachness to where we’re going with this. Thank you, that’s your time. Okay, looking for other speakers on this item. None online, I will go to Councilor Frank.

Thank you and I too appreciate the findings of the report. I think it demonstrates that we need to have some slight course corrections, but not a major overhaul, which I think is a good approach and a less expensive approach than the alternative. And I personally have always wanted to have members of the public on the commission, So I’m glad to see that was suggested. And I look forward to when that can occur.

I also appreciate the suggestions for improving the training processes. I appreciate the onboarding that we received, although it was mid-term. But even since then, for example, Councilwoman and I went and toured the specialized transit the phone booking system in the morning and that was helpful to understand how it was used and most of us have attended a tour of the facilities as well. So I think that continuous learning is important for commissioners.

more frequent reporting sounds good to me. I know, for example, the Health Unit sends monthly board minutes to council for their review and consideration. So I think that keeping us in the loop is an important way of trying to make sure that we’re working together in lockstep. I also just wanna say that I’m very proud of the work of the current commission that we’ve been able to do in the last year.

I think that we’ve been effective in progressing many items. And I’ll just give a quick summary because I don’t think that everyone is aware of all of them because we don’t have the continuous connection. So for example, we changed the agenda structure to allow for more debate. We approved an additional 2,000 service hours on top of the pre-existing 18,000 service hours for this fall to add more buses downtown at night, submitted the assessment growth case, which was approved, pre-ordered some buses for future growth, approved the new specialized transit provider, directed staff to report back on debit credit payment types.

We’ve worked a lot with Western students on a couple different route issues, and also increased communication engagement with a new Instagram page. If you have Instagram, please follow @LTCLDNONT ‘cause there’s a new transit Instagram page as well as hiring some summer students to assist with engagement opportunities. Also, if you have things that you wanna see transit, London Transit at, we have some students who’ll be able to show up. And I also wanna thank the London Transit staff who have continued to do their important work throughout the last couple of years, despite many governance changes.

They have stuck to their strategic plan and to their operational plans and made sure that there is stability and continuity in the work, so I just wanna say thank you to them as well. So I will be supporting this and appreciate the recommendations that were outlined. Thank you, just looking for other speakers. Seeing none, Councillor Lehman, will you take the chair?

I have the chair and I’ll go to Councillor Roman. Thank you. I appreciate receiving the report that’s in front of us and the engagement session and consultation that I participated in with KPMG, as well as the work you’ve done with city staff and with transit staff on this report. I’m supportive of what’s in front of us and I actually really appreciate and value the fact that we have something to work through and work from because I think some of the issues that we were seeing with transit before were just kind of unnamed, and it was difficult really to get a full perspective of what they were.

And now I feel like they’re named, they’re in front of us, which is very helpful, and it gives us a path forward. However, I do still feel like there are some underlying concerns that are perhaps more, in some cases ingrained in the culture of both the city and of LTC that I think will be more challenging to address. And I think you’ve provided some feedback on them , but at the same time, for instance, on formalizing how we’ll deal with any issues that arise, I will say that the frequent reporting will help, But a lot of this and a lot of what I read in between the lines of the report has to do with relationship building. And one of the recommendations you have is for a manager that would be responsible for that strategic relationship communication side.

Where I struggle with that is, I see that as a leadership function that must be at the highest level of any organization. So I’m just wondering why that wouldn’t be tasked to, or in your recommendation, it wasn’t tasked to the current leadership versus being a separate person. I’ll go to the delegate. Thank you, Mr.

Chairman, to the Councillor. So when we considered the additional position and enhancing the capacity of the organization, We’re mindful of the experience of other large transit organizations in the country and the incredible demands that are placed upon the leadership of these transit commissions. And London is no different. And what we found when we looked across the country, what was common was that the executive of a transit commission are being pulled with respect to operational issues, right?

Like there is a line down. How come the buses aren’t there? And you know it doesn’t take very long for a line that is not operating correctly to get escalated to the general manager, right? Or the executive of the of the transit commission.

At the other side, your leadership at the transit commission has deal with, I’m going to say the politics or the relationship with the city, who is their share funder, right, who oversees and sets the overall strategic priorities for the city, and who has a huge voice in how transit is delivered in the city. And that’s very demanding. So we felt that there is additional capacity required at the LTC to fill that gap. And one of the ways we thought we could fill that gap is through someone to provide communication support and strategic priority setting, excuse me, that’s not the right word, but help support the delivery of strategic priorities with the city as the partner and as the shareholder.

So that is the rationale behind our recommendation for the position. Councilor. Thank you. I appreciate the answer.

However, I, and this is just my personal opinion, I don’t see any difference between that and the role of the two delegations we had before us, LMC H and Hydro. They have strategic communication responsibilities within their top leadership. So, for me, that I don’t believe another person is needed to fulfill that. I think it’s strengthening teams.

With respect to the issue of dealing with conflicts, when you talked about training at the board level, are there trainings that you would recommend that would also be appropriate for the board when it comes to those issues? ‘cause when I think of the dynamics of transit, one of the concerns I have is even with a 4-3 model, I don’t think in general across all of our agencies, boards and commissions, we have a lot of training on how to deal with conflict. I’ll go to the delegate. Mr.

Chairman, to the counselor. I think that question would be perhaps best answered by your staff, given they have more familiarity with your governance resources. I’ll go to staff. Thank you, Mr.

Presiding Officer. We will be working on the content of that training, looking at what’s available in terms of off the shelf, because I’m not of a belief we need to necessarily reinvent the wheel. There are resources available for board training and working closely with the city clerk’s office and our colleagues working for Mr. Fowler, who arrange our council onboarding as well.

So we’ll review what is available now. It’s being used by some of the boards in the area that’s effective. If we’ve got something we can largely work from, that would be a great start. I don’t have any program names off the top of my head, but we will include in the implementation plan how we intend to approach that more specifically.

No, sorry. Thank you. One of the things I noted was transit Windsor was mentioned. They were mentioned around their advisory group.

I did try to bring something similar to LTC. We are working through a process of having an advisory component. It is more of a survey-based versus actual meeting, but I do think that that is missing. I’m just wondering if you can comment a little bit more on advisory groups.

I’ll go to the delegate. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, to the Councillor. Yes, advisory groups do have a role and we, you know, we do not include that as part of our recommendations.

However, given the importance of ensuring all voices are heard in the community, they can certainly be considered once you have established your new commission. Councillor. Thank you, and just with respect to the involvement of KPMG on an ongoing basis, so delivering this report is part of what’s the structure of what we have. Is there any follow-up?

And I’m wondering specifically around the, as we continue the implementation path with rapid transit, what kind of view or lens would K PMG consider or maybe future report to look at how we effectively rolled out the new model. I’ll go to delegate. Mr. Chairman, to the Councillor, as KPMG’s favorite client, we are always here for you.

However, my understanding with your project manager that with the delivery of this report, our engagement is coming to an end. Does staff, Ms. Sherry, do you want to comment? Thank you, Mr.

Presiding Officer. Yes, this is the end of the current commission of KPMG as well as the funding we had available to do the reviews the council had assigned to us. That said, as part of our implementation plan, when we build out our project charter, we will be looking for any resources we might require externally to deliver the implementation. That’ll be part of the report back.

And of course, as you mentioned, we do have a fairly new major transit initiative launching next year. And we did do a review on readiness. I think it would be prudent for us to follow up. That was largely a technical review, but it’s a bit of a stay tuned.

We’ll see what resources we need and what would make sense in terms of continuity of supports. Councilwoman. Thank you, my last point on public members. You mentioned specific transit operations planning, governance, expertise, et cetera.

Just wondering how we would put those job descriptions together well to attract the right candidates. Something to think about, I guess. I’ll go to the delegate. Mr.

Chairman, to the Councilor again, that might be something that your staff would be able to answer better than I could. No, I’ll go to staff. Thank you, Mr. Presiding Officer.

We will be working through what we believe the appropriate job descriptions for those public appointees would be, whether it is looking for, as some of the noted on council experience as transit users or from specific user groups, or if we’re looking for specific technical expertise and giving a range for council to select what is best reflective of the folks you want on the commission that ultimately delivers transit on your behalf. Council, you have about 30 seconds, please go ahead. Thank you, really appreciate the answers. Looking forward to some offline conversations with staff to further understand some of those components of the recommendation, thank you.

Thank you, and I’ll return the chair to your council. Thank you, I have the chair looking for other speakers. Seeing no other speakers online, none in chambers , we will call the question. Closing the vote, motion carries 14 to zero.

Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Peever, for being here today and for waiting alongside us . We will move on to item 4.3, which is a request to maintain the size of the London Police Service Board at seven members. I’m looking for a mover and a seconder on this item.

Councillor Layman, and I have Councillor Chassa. With that, I will look for any speakers. Okay, seeing no speakers, we will open up the vote on that matter. Housing the vote motion carries 14 to zero.

Okay, thank you, that takes us back to, well, it takes us to item five, which is our additional business and deferred matters. We first have item 2.4, which is the Strategic Plan Implementation Update mid-year 2026. We did have a delegation request from Mr. Henderson.

I do not see him in the gallery, but I will just take a moment to check if he’s online. He is not, so I will take his submission that’s included, but at this time, we will just look for a mover and seconder on item 2.4. I have Councillor McAllister and Councillor Hill ier. Thank you, and we’ll look for speakers.

I’ll start with Councillor Stevenson, thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to say I’ll be voting against this again as I have the last few times and I could go into great detail about why but I think I’ve covered it before. I’ll just highlight the biggest issues I had was that the council set what we wanted to have happen and how that was done was prepared by staff and we didn’t even have the chance to say we were okay with that.

So right off the bat, things didn’t look certainly the way I wanted them to look and I don’t know about my colleagues. The other part is the tracking of actions. You know, 550 actions and we’re 96% complete on actions. It’s the same issue I have with interactions when it comes to the social service agencies.

If our interactions and our actions aren’t creating the results that we want committed to, intended to create And we’re not talking about how to course correct , how to get those outcomes or results, then it’s really an unfortunate waste of resources, in my opinion, so I will not be supporting this. It’s the last one for this term of council, as far as I know, the next one comes in November if it’s consistent with the rest of the reports unless we’re gonna get one as it is the end of council. So I just think it’s a very disappointing, I like strategic plans, I think they can be really valuable. It’s just like mission and vision statements.

They can be something you just tick off and do and never look at. And they just go in the drawer where they can actually drive a corporation forward. And so maybe there’ll be an opportunity in the next term of council. Thank you, I look for other speakers.

I’ve Councillor Pripple. Thank you, so I will make my comments and they’ll be quite different than what we just heard. And I wanna say this, three years ago we put together be like a mission, vision, values, expected outcomes, strategies, and we also implemented to the bottom step implementation plan. We all, by the way, unanimously, we went step by step, and if you remember, it took us a long time to go through it, but we approved it.

We approved it step by step, including the strategies, including the outcomes, including implementation plan. I have to say a state that in three years when I look where we started, and especially as the the implementation plan where we were and we are right now. Thank you very much to the staff. What a great improvement.

I had to, if I look at even online, and again, this is not a public knowledge for private companies, but if you look at online, do we have how it’s presented, the dashboard, this on track, delayed, under review, expected results, mechanics, with all the graphs and everything, how great professional it is, Yes, could the substance be always better? Absolutely, it could be. Everything can always be better. But it’s something that we all agreed to step by step.

I wanna thank staff. I think I gave them over 40 questions on Monday. I received eight pages this morning with all the answers that I needed. So again, if you look at this, and if you are just gonna look at just the report graphs, if you don’t go deep to the detail that you can see on the deadline, of course you might not be disappointed.

But can you find the things that you are looking for? Many. So again, as everything else, it can be better. And my proud of the last three years, and there is so much positive there.

Could there be more positive? Absolutely. But there is so much positive. And I really want to thank the city manager, Trevor Fowler’s team, Nick Steinberg, really with all the stuff that they are keeping.

And actually, no, I’m going to say I hope I still have time. I really want to thanks to these organizations. Middlesex London Health Unit, Upper Time, Skittle Creek, Kevin Garden Market, London Public Library, London Public Service, Police Service, London Fire Department, Alden House, Museum London, Arts Council, London Transit, Tourism London, Film London and the feedback from Chamber of Commerce. This report in my eyes should never be under consent.

All these organizations, if I look at organizations, financials and this report are the two most important reports of any corporation. This report, if I look at everything else, brings most of our community together, working together, and trying to maximize the opportunities. Again, could we maximize them more? Absolutely.

Are we on the right track? Yes, we are. I certainly hope, because this is my last update, I certainly hope that the future council is gonna continue in this, and just improve it, make it better together with the staff. So thank you, but I really see you.

I will be very much voting in support of it. And thank you all, and thank you to staff. Thank you, I’m looking for other speakers on this item. Okay, seeing none online and just so, could be the wear Deputy Mayor Lewis’s online and Councilor Closea and the Mayor had to step away.

Okay, with that, seeing no one in chambers, with their hand up, we will open the vote. Closing the vote, motion carries 12 to one. Okay, thank you, that moves us on to item 2.5, which is the RBC Place London Steam transition. I know that Councillor Stevenson and Councillor P ribble have let me know that they have a alternative, but not contradictory motion to put on the floor, which includes a Part C, so I will let them introduce that.

Thank you, yes, I’d like to move the staff recommendation plus a Part C, which says the civic administration be directed to provide a report to the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee with an update on funding once the project cost is known and the contingency amount has been revised. Thank you. And I understand you have a secondary councilor Privel. Thank you.

Would you like to speak to it to begin with? And then we’ll take other discussion on this item . I would just repeat the same thing. And I just wanna say that both of us are on the R BC board just in case some individuals don’t know.

Thank you. Okay. I will look for other speakers on this item. Councilor Trossa.

Just a quick question. Does adopting these recommendations preclude us from taking action? I’ll just leave it like that. Does this close the matter or does this not preclude it?

Thank you. I will go to Ms. Barbone. Thank you through the chair.

This report specifically only deals with setting a budget so that we can do the proper transfer to allow RBC to begin the work because in order to commence any procurement, a budget and an established source of financing needs to be available first. So this does not preclude any other actions in the future. This only deals with the very specific item of setting the budget so that RBC plays can proceed. Councillor Trossa.

Yes, thank you and with that very clear response, I do not need to proceed with further questions at this point. Thank you, looking for other speakers. I have Councillor Ferrienex. Thanks, Chair, with respect to the amendment.

So it’s looking for a report back. How would staff necessarily take that? Is that just you providing an update of what the final cost is after we find out how much it’s gonna be with, and then it would be to a maximum amount with the contingency, or we’d be getting a full report on everything else. Is it just like an update on cost?

Thank you. So you’re talking about the new Part C. That’s in the motion. And I will go to Ms.

Burbone and Ms. Stewart, whoever wants to go on that question. Thank you through the chair. So certainly we will be working Ms.

Stewart’s team and RBC Place will be looking at doing this. RBC Place is leading the work on this. We’re certainly providing as much consultative support as possible given our experience with trying to move forward with other buildings at the city of London. So obviously, based on our experience, we know that through the detailed design process, when you are doing something significantly this complex in a building that wasn’t built to do it this way , there is a great deal of design work and through design work, we know that we can find certain things.

So once that is completed, and certainly we would work with them that once we know what those amounts are, and they’ve begun that we can certainly have a report Council to convey that and work with RBC place whether they write a letter or we’ll figure that out once we know what that the next steps will be when the work is complete. Councilor Ferrera. And final follow-up question, would you take this report as including everything else with Centennial Hall, the library, would we have updates with that or do we have separate reports? Thank you.

I’ll go to Ms. Fairbone. Thank you through the chair. So we ‘ve already reported out on what the final costs are for all of these city facilities based on the the contracts that have been awarded at this point in time.

So the only thing outstanding will be the RBC plays as they’re just starting to commence that work, noting they were providing notification at a very different time than the previous facilities for the city of London. Councilor Ferrera. Okay, thank you. Thank you, looking for other speakers.

I have Councilor Stevenson. Thank you, I just had a question around the contingency amount. So what happens to the leftover amount of the contingency for these projects And what does delegated authority allow in terms of that being transferred to other things? Go to Ms.

Barbone, thank you through the chairs . So because there is a specific resolution and this is set aside for a specific capital project, that direction is in and will establish the budget. So through our budget monitoring process, no different than what we would do when we’ve recently brought forward our capital budget monitoring, when projects are complete and if there is anything left over, those are returned to the sources for which they came. That is done through our annual and bi-annual monitoring, capital monitoring processes.

This would follow the exact same process in that regard. Councillor Stevenson. Thank you, that’s all. Thank you, looking for any other speakers on this item.

Okay, seeing none, we will open the vote. Opposing the vote, motion carries 13 to zero. Okay, thank you, that takes us on to item 2.6, which is the review of the FRFPQ 2020-25-056, the redevelopment of City Hall campus procurement and related information. For this item, we have a motion that includes to receive, just looking for a mover and seconder, Councillor Frank, Councillor Ferrera, and we’ll begin discussion on this item.

Councillor students. Thank you, through you to staff. I’m just wondering if we could get sort of a general update on where this project stands, because my understanding is, you know, it was part of the multi-year budget process. The funding was there, but this seems to have derailed.

And now we’re talking about not getting a report back until 2027. So in terms of there was talk of other locations, like is there gonna be any option for this council to provide direction as to next steps, or is this being moved forward to the next term of council? Thank you. I will go to Ms.

Barbone. Thank you through the chair. So on in September, when we brought forward the report with respect to the stage of the RFPQ in September, I think that was September 16th, that council directed us to, Well, Council directed to cancel the two stage R FP and referred it back to staff for a number of items, the majority of which have been provided to you today. And the remaining item is subject to the completion of the downtown master plan, which is not coming forward to council until next month.

So as a result, we’re unable to complete the rest of that direction until that report is brought forward and we see what the outcome of that discussion is and then we will proceed to report back. So given the timing with the election in the fall , that report will not be able to come forward till 2027 as we had noted in September. Councillor Stevenson. Okay, thanks, disappointing, I think for a lot of us, but my concern too is, and I know we’re doing a lot of talk about procurement this week, but this procurement process, I mean, we had significant early market interest, 35 plan takers, 26 site visits, then only two submissions, one withdrawn, the brief survey.

So the feedback received talks about, there’s a lot of criticism around our procurement process, things being perceived as restrictive and the team formation evaluation was unclear. Questions about terminology, inconsistencies, financial expectations were unclear and uncertainty around the public-private partnership type models . I just wondered if, like this is a bit concerning to Londoners who look at this and think this is again, this is us, it’s our building, our project, something that’s been talked about for I believe a decade. And the procurement process again just seems like a really big failure.

Is there anything that staff can share that maybe counteract some of what’s in here or helps us understand why the procurement results were so poor. Thank you, I’ll go to Ms. Dater’s fair. Thank you, through you, Madam Chair.

I appreciate the feedback that’s been shared. I do want to be clear that as Council asked us to do, we went and got the feedback from those who submitted to the RFP process. The information that we’ve shared in this report is their feedback. We haven’t, we have done the best that we can share exactly what they said so that you’re fairly clear about what the proponents felt.

I want to be clear that in my mind we continue to manage this process through our council approved procurement process and I would suggest to you that those processes are highly defined and highly regulated and we continue as best as possible to ensure that they are absolutely effectively implemented. With respect to this process I think we’ve done exactly what we need to do in terms of bringing this report back, and as Ms. Barbone has suggested, there will be additional information once the downtown master plan is presented to council on June 16th. Councilor Stevenson.

Thank you, and I do hear you, and I do appreciate the willingness to bring back the feedback that was shared in the wording that was provided, and I’ll just reiterate that it’s very concerning. It’s concerning that people who wanted to participate in a really big project in our city have these perceptions. And I think it’s worthy of some discussion and some reflection, because this is not the only time that I’m hearing, at least, about very serious concerns and dissatisfaction with the procurement process in our city. And it’s deeply concerning to me, because we want the investment, we want the projects, we want to be a great city, we want to see amazing things happen here.

And if this is the experience of people who were willing to put their time, effort, energy, talent, and potentially funding into projects, I think it’s concerning. And we had issues with the audit in terms of procurement. And I’ve raised just this week when we did the procurement biannual report. And I’ve brought things forward to committee regarding some of the concerns that proponents are having, feeling as though there’s some serious issues.

As I said, I don’t want to belabor them too much, but unclear expectations, terminology, and consistencies. I’m hoping there’s something here that civic administration can use to in terms of continuous improvement because it doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in terms of our next procurement process for this same project. I’m just not sure how we’re gonna get different results. If we just keep saying that what we do is great and everything we do is following procedure and it’s council approved.

I feel like some reflection and maybe some council direction is needed here. So I’m gonna reflect on it myself, but this is something that we were told a couple of years ago that it was super important that we move forward. We know the condition of this building and to be in this situation is just gonna be seen is very unsatisfactory to most Londoners. I’ll go to Ms.

Stadres there. Thank you Madam Chair and through you. Certainly appreciate the feedback that’s been received from committee this evening. I do want to remind people, council members and committee members that on page 198, we shared the information and the suggestions that we received.

We spoke to the reality of the requirement to get greater clarity regarding the project structure in the future. an extraordinarily complex project, an existing building, an apartment building on our land, another building, and a parking structure that is extraordinarily complex based on the ways to been developed. And I certainly appreciate the opportunities to have discussions about our procurement policies. Certainly happy to have anyone refer those as you would like to to the audit committee.

That’s another way to do this. So I wanna ensure that as civic administration, we are committed to ensuring that we take Council’s direction, which we have done in this report. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor McAllister.

I see that you didn’t for me, you had to leave at five. Thank you so much. Councillor Hopkins had to as well. So thank you to those that have informed me.

Okay, looking for other speakers on this item, I’d Councillor Kerbal next. Thank you, Mr. Chair, to the staff. The report states to assess the downtown master plan recommendations with respect to the role of City Hall.

Are we considering, or it’s not gonna be us, it’s gonna be the new council. Outside these premises, is this gonna include potentially other buildings downtown London, or is this just restricted to the current facility where we are at? Thank you, about a mistake is there. Thank you, I threw you.

At this point in time, we are receiving, you are receiving this report, and you will receive in June the recommendations from the consultant who’s developed the downtown master plan. Those recommendations may include some discussion with respect to other areas that the city could consider in order to support downtown, and that might include potentially city hall campus in other locations at this point in time we have no direction to look at that. we’ve come back with this direction in respectful of the direction you gave us in September. Councillor Pervall.

I do have a follow-up. If the master plan does not include it, will the will this council have the opportunity to open it up outside the current premises? Thank you. I’ll go to Ms.

Dater’s Bear. Thank you . Through you, certainly any future council will have the opportunity to have any discussions it relates to this project. And we would take your advice and direction as to what that looks like.

It would be the next council though, based Based on the comments we’ve made earlier. Councilor Preble. If it’s coming back in June, the downtown master plan. Would the council be current council be able to direct staff to come back in 2027 with opportunities, including outside these premises?

Thank you to Stater’s Fair. And thank you again for the question through you. If there are directions to civic administration to undertake the next process as it relates to other space or other buildings within the core, then we would take that direction. Obviously, we would need sufficient time to look into that information and get back to committee and council with an appropriate report.

It’d be impossible, I think, for me to tell you at this point in time whether or not that would happen in the period of your current council. And so I don’t wanna mislead you by suggesting that could be the case. But it would be council direction that we would need in order to do that. Councilor Preble.

Perfect, thank you, and I do understand that. Now, when the report comes back currently, it says stop will come back in 2027. Will there be an opportunity to be more specific and not just 2027 to go Q1, Q2? Certainly not Q4, that’s the same thing.

But 2027 is a long time, 12 months. Will there be an opportunity to shorten this more be more specific? Ms. Dator-Spare.

Thank you for the question through you, Madam Chair. I don’t wanna mislead you by suggesting that that’s not possible. I do wanna say that it will depend upon the information you receive, what direction committee and council takes as it relates to the Downtown Master Plan, whether there’s sufficient information for council to make a decision as it relates to this project. And I think given the complexities again of this location and other locations in this community, I think we would require ourselves to be consistent in our approaches to ensuring that the best and taking the advice we’d receive from those who are part of this process.

We’ve got great advice here about how to make this better moving forward in the next time. And so we’d want to ensure that anything that we developed based on your direction reflects the kind of advice we received from proponents and develop a system in a process moving forward that really embraces that and ensures that it’s clear and that we are coming back to council with a very good recommendation moving forward. It is complex. I’m not suggesting to you that we aren’t open to get any direction that council wants to give us.

And depending upon what that is, and the magnitude of it and the complexity, it will depend upon, that will impact the timelines. Councilor Pribble. Sounds very, and thank you very much for the answers. Thank you.

I have Councilor Trossa, then Councilor Ferrara. On reflection, I think some of the questions that I had are just getting ahead of ourselves and can be deferred to some point in the future. So I don’t have anything. Thank you, Councillor Ferrera.

Thanks, Chair, I’ve been listening carefully to this discussion and the questions and the answers. So from what I understand, like this report is telling us there’s necessary lifecycle work. We’ve got feedback from the RFPQ or we’ve got feedback on kind of what people have said or of certain tapers on the bids. And I also see that what is coming back is that report in 2027, what the next steps are.

And I do understand that some of the questions are about whether we look elsewhere from this land or we continue it on this property. But I guess I would ask, do we, regardless of what comes back, like staff is gonna go out, you’re gonna kind of look at everything that we have in front of us, you could potentially come back with another location in that report back in 2027 . Is that correct to assume? Or is it locked in to this space?

Thank you, thank you through the chair. So without presuming what council direction is going to be and the feedback on the downtown master plan that’s coming next month, I think it would be really challenging to provide an answer to that. Certainly the first step and as the direction that was provided to us in September was to evaluate what the next steps would be with respect to the downtown master plan. So certainly we’re waiting Council’s direction on what that is, and then subject to that, we would go back and complete the work and identify what the next steps would be if there’s applicable budget requirements that also need to be modified as a result of the significant deferral in time for whatever we do.

So there is a great deal of analysis there for us to be able to turn it around and provide the best recommendation forward on what those next steps would be. and certainly we will await council direction and we will take that council’s direction and move from there to provide our best recommendation when we are able to bring that forward. Council for— Okay, thank you for that. And I understand that report back regardless if it happens to land in the downtown plan or not, we’re looking for a role of our new Pacific space to also promote the downtown’s vitality and promote the downtown’s impact.

So even if they are aligned or not, we are still able to get that report back and it could have those options open. I’m just wondering, like I’m wondering, do we even need to give a direction for that when the downtown plan comes, or however the recommendations come out? Ms. Berggone, thank you for the chair.

So that component is in the resolution already from the September 2025. So that’s the direction that we’re taking is that subject to what is within the downtown master plan and what the council’s directions are. We would go back and reevaluate and then bring forward a recommendation. So that’s the direction that we are proceeding under.

Councilor Perraa. Okay, thank you. That’s kind of how I saw the recommendation that we already given forward. We’re still a little open for opportunity.

And there’s no lock set place of where it could go or what happens. It’s just basically something that’s gonna come back that will not only provide the seat of council in the head of civic administration, but also that promotion of downtown vitality. So I kind of see it as it’s still an open discussion going on right now. And I guess that’s a comment, that’s not a question.

Thank you, looking for other speakers. Councillor Layman, if you take the chair. Please go ahead, Councillor. Thank you and through you.

So first, just thank you to staff for preparing the report that’s in front of us. I appreciate that this is a reflection on the feedback that we received through this process. this RFPQ process. I will say that.

I think there ‘s a lot of good learning that happened through that process. This is a very large project. And what we set out was quite ambitious to begin with. And I think that that ambition led to maybe some of the complexities that we saw that came back with that RFPQ as the conclusion states , you know, as we move forward, that clarity that ‘s needed the definitions of the financial expectations are all things that we need to have a lens and a view to and lastly I just want to talk about the expected housing model.

So one of the things that I’m I’m trying to better understand with where we’re heading with this direction is that housing component and just wanting to better understand whether or not there is a potential to decouple some of those if there is a need to do so in order for us to move on the building needs that we have for this facility. So just wondering if someone might be able to comment on that. That ‘ll go stuff. Through the chair that absolutely can happen so I think this was very informative the work that we did to see whether there might be an opportunity.

I think it’s actually push moving us and information that we’ve received that this may not be a good fit between trying to combine that housing. Of course, every time we look at a new facility or a piece of property, we of course would like to entertain the thought of housing. But if that doesn’t work, which we’re kind of seeing from this, you can absolutely decouple it from any kind of future procurement. Councilwoman.

Thank you. And I’m wondering how we would go about or when that kind of a conversation would potentially happen. Is it something where we need to provide direction at the time that we receive the downtown master plan? Is it going to speak to that at all?

Or I’m just not sure when we get into that component of the conversation further around whether or not that is the right next step. Personally, I’d like to be able to evaluate that a little bit more to make a decision. But I’m not sure if the recommendation is that that too comes back for a future term of council. Ms.

Dater’s bear. Thank you, Mr. Presiding Officer. And through you, I think it’s probably fair that in the future we would come back with options, an option that might include housing, an option that might not include housing.

And I think through that process, or an option that includes other things as well. And I think through the sharing of options, and then costing those options, and looking at returns on investment and those kind of realities in complexity, As you’ve mentioned, we would have a better sense then of what the best option is to move forward. That might come through some feedback you receive from the downtown master plan, but ultimately that might just be feedback you receive. We’ll come back with recommendations, options for consideration by committee and council based on the types of things you’ve been talking about already.

If development of housing isn’t something that we would do at that time because of costs or complexities, than that might not be an option we would bring forward. Yeah, thanks. So I appreciate the answers. I will say that I worry that even for us to go down that decision point to discuss the optionality of it before we get to another RFPQ, it’s just another component of potentially having more decision points, having more timeline .

And I’m worried about the timeline with the existing building condition. and with some of the costs that we have to incur. So that’s something I’m trying to balance and I’m not sure how to make the best decision with respect to this because I see these creeping costs. I see the expenses.

We’re going to get another report back on the plumbing condition, for instance, and the valve failures. I like, I’m sure my colleagues don’t want to see work disruptions because of things like that. And then we also have the Regicouper Square project. So I want to understand kind of when on a timeline basis, when those decision points or those optionalities will be presented so we can make some moves towards what we believe to be what the vision will be for the building and for this location.

Ms. Datorsbier, can you kind of, I think what the council is looking for is a, you know, not an exact timeline, just kind of where you see this going and when it ‘ll be coming back to council with some of those options. Thank you through you . Mr.

Presiding Officer, our intention would be to bring the information back in 2027 and I think the advice that you’ve given us with respect to timelines and ensuring that the information reflects all the options or considerations and that that be done in a timely manner as possible is advice that we take and move on it. and respecting that lots of things are changing in the market as well, the broader community and the broader more global market as well. Councilwoman. Thanks, my final point is just a comment and that relates to Reg Cooper Square.

I guess I thought we would have a chance to re-envision what that square would look like and what kind of community use we could have out of that space. And my concern right now is as we continue to move the timeline on this and those costs and repairs are more immediate, that we may miss that opportunity. So I’m wondering if maybe, as it is a comment, but if anyone can also provide some feedback, that’d be helpful. I’ll go to staff, care to comment, I’m not comment.

Thank you, Mr. Presiding Officer, through you. Definitely we have a iconic space named after the former city clerk. So that’s important.

So we want to ensure that as you’ve indicated that we are able to support whatever we can do. It is also a complex piece of real estate that we own. We try as best as possible to keep it as well maintained as we can. It is part of the biggest challenge we have of this structure.

It also supports our parking and the other supports for the community. So I do think that that’s certainly part of the discussion that we want to have and need to ensure that whatever we develop there for its continued use is really a function of supporting a community space in ways that people can use it. So they come to the seat of council and the seat of government in this community. Should we move forward at that option?

Sorry, that’s not a great answer to the question, but the challenge is it’s a very unique space that we cannot do a lot on because of the nature of how it’s been created and built. It’s a patio stone through you. Councilor, I’m back to you with 30 seconds. I guess I’m hoping we’ll see a design.

When we get to that stage, will that be part of what we will see? Will we see a design or go to staff? It’s not existing. Thank you for the chair.

So that all depends on what the council direction is going to be in the future on how this proceeds , how this project proceeds. So certainly through the RFP that did not proceed , the intention was to include the redevelopment of the square as part of whatever the future redevelopment going to be because as you’re doing redeveloping and possibly creating a new structure, that would be the opportune time to consider that. Other previous discussion talked about having small community engagement pieces that would speak to getting some feedback as to what to do with that. So that was envisioned to be part of the RFP and how we could proceed.

Noting that we’re not proceeding at this point in time, that will be waiting until what the the future direction will be and what the next envision for proceeding with any procurement would be subject to council approval. Councilor. Thank you, appreciate the answer. So follow up more on the line.

I’ll return to chair to you. Thank you. I have the chair looking for final speakers. Seeing none online, seeing none in chambers, we’ll open the vote on this item.

Building the vote, motion carries 10 to one. Thank you. I have not been made aware of any additional business looking to committee for item seven adjournment, motion to adjourn. Councillor Van Meerberg and Councillor Cuddy, thank you by hand all in favour.

Councillors say yes. Councillors say yes. Motion carries. Thanks everyone.

Have a great evening.