BY MICHAEL-ALLAN MARION AND SUSAN GAMBLE
EXPOSITOR STAFF / BRANTFORD

Mayor Chris Friel and Coun. Larry Kings were scrambling Tuesday to keep together the city's controversial deal with an industrial developer to buy the Harding Carpets Brownfield site for a warehousing operation.

The mayor was also making arrangements to install security around what has turned out to be, not a vacant 334,300-square-foot building, but one full of piles of products, debris, scrap tires, illegal activities and evidence everywhere of squatters. .

It's something city councillors and the developer, Steve Charest, president of Toronto-based King and Benton Development Corp., had not seen before a hastily arranged tour with the media Tuesday.

"If we had seen this we would probably have handled it differently," Charest told Friel and Kings at one point during Tuesday's tour. "How all this got here and where this is from blows my mind. We weren't aware of this when we made the offer. If the city wants to reconsider, well reconsider, too."