A newly-independent Surrey councillor is crying foul after CTV News uncovered the costs of a fact-finding mission by the city's mayor and entourage that brought them to a five-star, beachfront Puerto Rico hotel.
Barinder Rasode says the trip never went to city council for public scrutiny, and it wasn’t worth $15,000 of taxpayer funds to go all the way to a tropical island and stay three nights at the Ritz-Carlton in San Juan.
“I was quite shocked to learn that this trip that didn’t go through the normal process was to Puerto Rico,” Rasode said. “I think it’s unfortunate and a waste of taxpayer dollars without having any accountability.”
Mayor Dianne Watts was among six people travelling to learn about a high-tech closed-circuit camera system offered by IBM. The trip also included RCMP Chief Bill Fordy, Surrey Fire Chief Len Garis, Surrey city manager Vincent Lalonde, and criminologists Dr. Irwin Cohen and Jimmy Dhaliwal from the University of the Fraser Valley.
“CCTV was one of our major objectives in our crime-reduction strategy and it hasn’t been quite met, so we were anxious to start focusing on getting it off the ground,” Surrey Fire Chief Len Garis said in an interview.
Their first stop was New York, where they met with the NYPD commissioner to learn about the camera deployment in New York, and the city’s real time crime centre, which links cameras, computers and officers. They also met with representatives from New Jersey.
From there, the group travelled mostly economy class to San Juan, where they stayed at the Ritz Carleton hotel, costing $245.42 a night including the resort fee and local taxes. According to Expedia, the only more expensive hotel in San Juan is the Hilton.
Watts has come under fire before for extravagant spending on business trips. In December, she and two city staffers added a three-day vacation in Istanbul to a business trip in Israel, though they paid the city back the cost.
Watts wasn’t available to answer questions from CTV News, and the mayor’s office presented Garis to answer questions.
Garis, who the Surrey Mayor’s office said organized the trip, said the hotel was recommended as a safe one in a dangerous country. There are about 1000 murders a year in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory with a population of 3.6 million people.
“It is a dangerous place, and we stayed in a place that offered us some safety and security. That’s it,” Garis said.
Meal costs on the receipts are listed at $765.81, $500.84, $458.12, $235.09, though Garis says the group paid for as many as 12 people to dine as part of meetings about the IBM system, which is used to record what happened on a dangerous highway from the airport into the centre of town.
However, the cameras only moved the violence – meaning that after an investment of some $8 million, they are rarely used, said Garis, adding information like that convinced the delegation the IBM system was not the way to go.
“(This trip) probably saved us money in the long run. I suppose if we bought a system that didn’t work we’d be having a different conversation, wouldn’t we,” he said.
Rasode said there’s no need to go all the way to the tropics to learn that.
“We should do an assessment on whether this can be done over the internet or through nearby cities in Canada,” she said.
Rasode was a member of Surrey First, the party led by Dianne Watts, before she publicly split with the party in April.
