by LORRAINE CARPENTER

Local historians will attest to Verdun’s street-fighting spirit, but the battle currently underway between some Wellington street merchants and the association supposedly representing them is a more modern brawl. Despite the success of the cult video store Sukubus, one of the strip’s only businesses to attract a city-wide clientele, the three-year-old establishment has been cut out of Wellington’s Societé de développement commercial (SDC).

Jason Dire, Sukubus’s owner, says he led an “anti-SDC faction,” having gathered over 60 signatures from fellow merchants on a petition demanding transparency from the SDC council, which collects $1,000 to $2,000 annually from each of Wellington’s 240 merchants. Dire charges that the merchants see little bang for their buck and that the council provides very vague annual reports.

“If [the council’s] numbers are all clean, they would clear their name and we would look foolish. But they don’t want anyone looking at their records, so obviously they’re hiding something,” says Dire.

The SDC’s secretary treasurer Normand Therrien denies these allegations, calling them “disruptive, disgruntled attacks from someone who doesn’t want to pay their fees.”

“It’s not a question of paying the fees,” Dire responds. “I would pay double if it was administered correctly and everyone benefited. But if the fee was only $10, I would still have a problem if it was mismanaged.”

The SDC recently appointed Ping Chen, owner of the C. Cassia boutique, as an independent auditor. Chen, who supported Dire’s opposition, alleges that Therrien prematurely aborted the audit, allowing Chen the opportunity to look at very few documents. But Chen says the few records she did see were rife with irregularities that went unexplained at an SDC council meeting last week. Instead, she says, the council responded by replacing her with one of its members.

“I was able to glance at invoices and speak out at the meeting, but now the auditor is someone who was a council member until the minute they appointed him,” she says.

While Wellington’s merchants have the power to vote out the SDC council, Dire and Chen predict that will never happen due to poor attendance at the meetings.

The Verdun borough’s local development commissioner Alain Laroche, who helped relaunch the struggling SDC four years ago, says the lack of transparency is because the majority of Wellington merchants aren’t that interested.

“Every year, the challenge is to get people to the general assembly,” he says. “Why do I spend so much time helping these people when they don’t participate, all they do is complain?”

Despite another disappointing turnout, the SDC passed a resolution last week to remove Sukubus from the SDC. At the meeting, Dire’s removal was justified by alleged complaints about the store’s sidewalk-sale kiosque blocking traffic.

“[Laroche said] it wasn’t because Jason was outspoken, it was because the city complained,” says Chen. “But who is the city? Alain Laroche is from the municipal government.”

While this won’t affect his business, Dire is frustrated that his opposition to the SDC has been quashed. Although a lawyer advised him not to present the petition last week, he’s still considering putting it to use somehow.

“I owe it to the people who signed,” he says.