Mammoliti, Shiner get rent deals from Toronto developers

Two Toronto councillors have been paying well below the market rate to rent apartments from developers that have millions of dollars in contracts with the city, a CBC News investigation has found.

David Shiner and Giorgio Mammoliti each leases a two-bedroom suite at 88 Erskine Ave., near Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue, an apartment building run by Greenwin Property Management and owned by its sister company, Verdiroc Holdings.

Mammoliti has history of involvement in billboards

A Toronto councillor who helped two real estate investors get permission to place billboards on their properties and later accepted loans from the businessmen has other links to the outdoor advertising industry in the city.

Giorgio Mammoliti has received political contributions from people affiliated with the industry, supported numerous applications for billboards and, in 2009, attempted to have his ward designated as a "special sign district" where all outdoor signs would require the approval of the local business improvement association.

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford reacts to Coun. Mammoliti's loans

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford said he would not pass judgment on loans city Coun. Giorgio Mammoliti received from a pair of Toronto real estate investors until he speaks with him — but says he would not have taken such loans himself.

The mayor's comments come after a CBC News investigation first revealed that Mammoliti received at least $275,000 in mortgage loans from a pair of real estate investors who owned billboards along Highway 401.

Mammoliti denies taking dirty loans

Embattled councillor Giorgio Mammoliti has responded to media reports that he received $275,000 in loans from developers he helped out at City Hall.

On Thursday, CBC reported that the York West councillor took out two loans from real estate investors whose plans for lucrative billboards he helped push through Etobicoke York Community Council.

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti arranged $200,000 loan through developer he helped

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti took a $200,000 loan from a company affiliated with a real estate developer he had given minor assistance in getting approval to erect lucrative billboards.

The 2007 loan was made by a company, Tradesea International, for which developer Mac Champsee serves as vice-president. In 2004 and 2006, Mammoliti had put forward routine community council motions in favour of Champsee’s applications for Highway 401 billboards on a Wilson Ave. property in Mammoliti’s York West ward.

Giorgio Mammoliti faces legal action over campaign finance violations

The political fate of Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti will soon be in the hands of a special prosecutor, now that Toronto’s compliance audit committee has unanimously voted to launch legal action.

An independent audit of Mammoliti’s 2010 campaign expenses found that the York West councillor appears to have exceeded his spending limit by 44 per cent — or $12,065 above the $27,464 limit.

If the special prosecutor decides to lay charges under the Municipal Elections Act — this is a provincial offence, not a criminal one — Mammoliti could face a fine or removal from office.

City Hall’s conspiracy of disgrace

On Oct. 3, retiring city CFO Cam Weldon gave a farewell address to city council. “You need to be nicer to each other,” he said. A couple of hours later, two councillors were on the verge of coming to blows, which tells you all you need to know about the state of civic discourse in Toronto.

Here’s how it happened: At the same meeting, independent ombudsman Fiona Crean was scheduled to formally present her report concluding that Rob Ford’s office had compromised the integrity of the public appointments process by shrinking timelines and interfering with staff. Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti suggested that her report was a politically motivated hatchet job. Questioning the integrity of a city-staff member is a breach of council’s code of conduct, so Mammoliti needed to apologize or be expelled from the chamber. Instead, he argued belligerently for several minutes, then said he’d voluntarily leave the chamber rather than be kicked out.

Mayor Rob Ford’s allies sink to a new low

For nearly five hours Thursday, Toronto city council exposed its nasty underside with such maniacal relish that only a tiny ombudsman with sturdy spine stood between the elected weasels and a disgusted public.

Fiona Crean, barely five feet tall, towered over her ill-mannered adversaries — deflecting their poisonous pronouncements with the ease of an accomplished fencer.

Pity the public service that labour beneath the club of the current administration, an outfit that governs through threats and intimidation. If you are the head of the TTC and you share a view opposite the mayor’s, you are fired, as was Gary Webster.

Pay up, city tells Mammoliti

The City of Toronto has retained an outside lawyer to assist in its efforts to collect $74,000 from Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, a key ally of Mayor Rob Ford.

Under former mayor David Miller, city council paid Mammoliti the money to cover his cost of defending himself against a challenge to his campaign expenses in the 2006 election.

Mammoliti had submitted legal fees of $36,598 and $15,487 for an analysis of his campaign office rent. Council paid those amounts, plus $22,320 to cover the income tax hit.

The city issued a letter demanding payment and retained lawyer Greg Richards at Weir Foulds to assist, said city solicitor Anna Kinastowski.

City staff went outside rather than give the file to a city lawyer because Mammoliti is, in effect, their boss as a member of city council, Kinastowski said.

The legal department had warned council that it didn’t have the legal authority to make the payment to Mammoliti, but council voted to do so anyway.

Ford’s child-care task force meets in secret

The head of Mayor Rob Ford’s task force on child care says its three remaining meetings might be held behind closed doors, after two other councillors cried foul for being turfed from its first meeting.

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti told the Star Thursday night, after Janet Davis and Kristyn Wong-Tam were ordered out of a city hall committee room and the door closed, that the three remaining meetings — Oct. 19, Oct. 26 and Nov. 3 — would be open to the public and councillors.

But on Friday Mammoliti (Ward 7 York West) he said that might not be the case. “A decision on that hasn’t been made yet,” he said.

Ford has said Toronto can no longer afford to fund 2,000 child-care spots subsidized by the city alone. He has asked the province to help pay for them and formed the task force to explore cheaper ways to provide more spots for low-income Torontonians.

Davis (Ward 31, Beaches-East York) and Kristyn Wong-Tam (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale) tried to attend the first meeting Thursday night but were ordered out of the room by Mammoliti and told by Ford’s staff “they mayor did not want us there.”

The Ford administration is not going to blink

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti vowed to forge ahead with the mayor’s budget-slashing agenda Wednesday, even as a committee he chairs voted to reject the KPMG core service review in its entirety.

“The Ford administration is not going to blink,” said Mammoliti, a key Ford lieutenant. “The Ford administration is going to continue to tell the population the truth about City Hall and where funds can be saved.”

Mammoliti was presiding over a meeting of the community development and recreation committee that debated recommendations from KPMG that include considering selling off nine of the city’s ten long term care homes, merging paramedic and firefighting services, scrapping the Christmas bureau that coordinates gifts to needy children, and eliminating 2,000 subsidized childcare spaces in the hopes the province will pay for them.

At the end of the seven-hour meeting, the committee voted to recommend the mayor spare those services from the axe on budget day.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, councillor

It’s hard to explain to anyone under 30 (who’d have been 8 when the Berlin Wall fell) what the Cold War was like, or even that it happened. Clashes between “communism and freedom,” a readiness to incinerate the planet, stalking “subversives.” A culture bathed in politics. The Hollywood red scare, the career of Ronald Reagan: from B-actor to president. And spy mania. It seems as remote as the Middle Ages yet many of us were there.

If you want your kids to understand the Middle Ages, you can take them to Medieval Times at the CNE. If you want give them a sense of the Cold War, take them to a council meeting at city hall. Look for Giorgio Mammoliti.

He announced recently that there are six or seven secret Communists on council with a long-term plot to take over all private property and control everyone’s thoughts and views. They’re hiding “underground” but he can detect them with his “keen” sense of political smell.

The consequences of Toronto city cuts for youth

Here's one dirty word you can call me, Mammoliti. Call me motha. You, too, Ford brothas. It's about time we started to talk family, because you're not just messing with the grown-ups when you tear all civility and grace from Toronto's public sphere.

The KPMG report you're studying for surgical guidance documents every place where the city offers any degree of excellence or innovation. These are highlighted as "opportunities" for the knife. How's that for a subliminal message to the kiddies? Let's gang up on the best and brightest.

This is perhaps too subtle for the mayor, but if you check out news from across the pond you can see it's time we paid attention to the subliminal messages in our urban culture fashions.

Ford's dysfunctional political fam has probably been too busy figuring out how to slice the flesh off our already thin metropolis to have noticed that last week in the U.K., thousands of angry, urban (and suburban) kids took their power in the way they know how -- a destructive rage on their neighbourhoods.

Giorgio Mammoliti: Political provocateur turned Rob Ford spokesman

Giorgio Mammoliti is sitting at his desk, on which sits a salad he does not seem to have touched. For many city councillors, this is a quiet summer Wednesday. Mammoliti is busy being Mammoliti. Dapper as usual in a dark suit, he is carrying on a lunchtime newspaper interview during the commercial breaks of a radio interview he is also conducting.

“I think this is about panhandling,” he had said a moment before the radio interview began, and that seemed reasonable enough. On Tuesday, as you have heard, he said police officers should force panhandlers into hospitals. Call-in-show gold.

‘Communist movement’ hiding in NDP, Mammoliti warns

Showing no sign of backing down, Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti continued the war of words that has erupted since he vowed to ban “communists” from a Facebook page designed to elicit input on balancing the city’s books.

Calling up the National Post on Thursday to respond to comments made by a Marxist, Mr. Mammoliti read out three definitions of communism, including the one in Oxford Dictionary which describes it as “a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs.”

“I’m going to say something that might be very controversial for the city, but it’s my view that the communist movement in Toronto is hidden, and it’s hidden through one of its major parties, and I used to belong to that party,” said Mr. Mammoliti, who was an MPP for the NDP party during the 90s.

Ford Canada asks Toronto councillor to remove company logo from Facebook page

A city councillor's Facebook page devoted to bolstering Ford the mayor has run afoul of Ford the carmaker.

Ford Motor Company of Canada has asked Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti, an acolyte of Mayor Rob Ford, to remove its “Built Ford Tough” logo from a page the councillor started titled “Save the City..Support the Ford Administration.”

A spokesman with the carmaker told the Globe and Mail she had received about a dozen calls complaining about the unauthorized use of the logo on Mr. Mammoliti’s site, which he has vowed to protect from Communist incursions to wide ridicule and derision.

“We have sent a request to the Councillor asking that the logo be removed from the site and will follow up with the Councillor as appropriate,” said Ford of Canada communications manager Kerri Stoakley in an email.

Facebook group not for layabouts and ‘communists:' councillor

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti has launched a Facebook site designed, he says, to give voice to the silent majority of working-class Torontonians who don’t have time to speak out at all-night City Hall meetings alongside layabouts and “communists.”

“The people who show up for the meeting, some may be working people, but they’re only working off the dime of taxpayers,” said Mr. Mammoliti of the 170 speakers who turned out to speak at a 22-and-a-half-hour executive meeting two weeks ago. “They only come to defend their salaries. I want to hear from the average Joe Blow who doesn’t even know what City Hall looks like.”

Pride funding likely safe — for now, says Mammoliti

Toronto Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti is conceding that hundreds of thousands of dollars of Pride funding already promised to organizers for 2011 will likely be delivered.

Mammoliti sent a release to media outlets Monday detailing his stance on publicly funded parades and marches. He had been expected to put forward a motion Tuesday to withhold the nearly $130,000 in grant money already committed to Pride organizers.

A video shot by Mammoliti on July 2, showing Dyke March participants carrying anti-Israeli apartheid signage, caused some concern about whether the City would make good on its promise to fund this year’s Pride events.

Earlier this year, Mammoliti demanded a written guarantee from festival organizers that the controversial group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid be banned from participating in Pride events.

QuAIA voluntarily agreed to stay away and in May, council approved funding on the condition that organizers ensure all participants adhere to the city’s anti-discrimination policy.

Mammoliti believes the presence of anti-Israeli apartheid signage constitutes a breach of the commitment organizers made, whether or not the signs belonged to members of QuAIA specifically. He also noted that some participants chanted, “We’re queer, we’re hot, Israeli apartheid is not.”

This year’s Pride funding “shouldn’t be safe,” he said, “but . . . it’ll probably be paid out because it’s deemed to be within policy by our bureaucrats. And while I still believe they’ve broken their commitment to the City of Toronto there’ll probably be nothing I can do to take this funding away this year.”

But Mammoliti’s watchful eyes are not resting solely on Pride.

“I have to congratulate the Pride Parade and the organizers because what they’ve done is they’ve opened up the eyes of City Hall to the larger picture. City taxpayers’ dollars should not be going towards any venue, including marches and parades, that have a political message slant to them.”

Mammoliti confirmed that if it were up to him, this would include funding for any artistic endeavour with a political message.

He denied that withdrawing public funding from anything considered “political messaging” might be fraught with problems.

“There’s no slippery slope here. It’s either we want tax dollars to go toward political messaging or we don’t. This councillor believes that we shouldn’t.”

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Source: Toronto Star