In a letter, Councillor Mike Del Grande has accused the city of planning to buy "soon-to-be-obsolete computers from a pre-determined supplier and pay more than (it) should."

Most councillors and city staff are sensitive about the slightest suggestion of corruption with computer purchasing since the city's last computer deal, with MFP Financial Services Ltd., led to a public inquiry.

So the letter from Del Grande (Ward 39, Scarborough-Agincourt) sent to councillors this week, outlining his concerns, hasn't made him popular.

"He's gone too far, again," said Councillor Peter Milczyn, chair of the committee involved in the $63 million request for proposals sent earlier this month.

"He's been making allegations that staff are corrupt, incompetent, unprofessional, without any substantiation, just because he doesn't agree with them," said Milczyn (Ward 5, Etobicoke-Lakeshore).

Del Grande showed the city's confidential request for proposals to people and has tried to negotiate his own deal with a supplier, Milczyn said. "If anybody's conduct should be called into question, it's his," Milczyn said.

Budget chief David Soknacki agrees.

"It takes a lot to make me angry, but this really makes me cross," Soknacki (Ward 43, Scarborough East) said about the letter. "Councillors have gone out of their way to change the entire evaluation process to accommodate councillor Del Grande's concerns."

At the end of it, he said, professionals with no stake in the outcome said, "The city was undergoing the right process. At some point we have to say we listened and you're wrong."

Del Grande knows councillors aren't happy with him.

"I've been chastised privately that I'm obstinate ... that I'm a bad guy," Del Grande said in a recent interview. He was unavailable yesterday. "I'm having a running war with the IT (information and technology) people ... a backroom war."

Companies interested in supplying the city with 15,000 computers, and the servers and networks that go with them, have until next Tuesday to reply.

Staff will evaluate the applications and council could make its pick as early as September. After that, the city plans to buy about 800 computers a month.

But Del Grande says the city's request for proposals is so narrow it knocks most companies out of the field, favours Intel processors over cheaper AMD ones, and 32-bit processing capability over faster 64-bit.

"It is clear that a preferred supplier was chosen in advance of the RFP's (request for proposal) release — a blatant violation of the city's purchasing policy that will likely result in our spending more to receive less," Del Grande said in his letter.

It's not true, said Milczyn, who added that the problem is that Del Grande doesn't understand the process. Specific requests are just so staff can compare prices of "apples to apples." It is not a guarantee of what type of computers the city will eventually purchase, he said.

The public inquiry into why a $43 million computer-leasing deal the city signed with MFP in 1999 ended up costing almost twice that amount resumes Aug. 30 and is expected to finish mid-September. The inquiry wants to know what went wrong.

But the city can't wait for the inquiry's finding because it needs new computers before March, 2005, when the lease on the MFP ones expires.

To make up for that, the city has talked to the same computer consultant who testified at the inquiry. "We were using the most recent information from the inquiry," said Councillor Brian Ashton (Ward 36, Scarborough Southwest).