There will be no forensic audit of the mayor's expenses. Motions put forward by Coun.
There will be no forensic audit of the mayor's expenses.
Motions put forward by Coun. Sheena Hughes would have initiated a forensic audit of the mayor's expenses as well as had the auditor provide a written assessment of the city-led review of council's expenses and the staff recommendations.
In October, council voted to have staff perform an audit of the previous 12 months of expenses for councillors and the previous 36 months for the mayor. The review of the mayor's expenses was to include his expenses as chair of the Capital Region Board.
That was triggered by concerns and questions over Mayor Nolan Crouse's expenses, including items that appeared to be double-billed to both organizations.
The review was returned to council earlier this year, flagging a number of items for all of council and pointing out holes in city policy. Councillors were given the chance to respond in writing, and that report was presented on Monday.
During Monday's meeting, Hughes outlined her issues with the review provided by city staff and why she was still calling for an audit by an outside contractor.
Those concerns included that the city staff who conducted the review, though anonymous, are not certified auditors.
She also went over the expenses review and flagged about 60 items, noting several things like claims with no location specified or there was no information on who attended a meeting.
“The reality is we did not have a 100 per cent audit,” she said. She said she's talked to an auditor about how much time would be needed to audit the expenses and was told 25 hours or less, probably less given the data already gathered by city staff.
She told the Gazette that just a review of the staff's work and recommendations would probably take five hours or less, estimating the cost to be $2,000 maximum.
MacKay had taken his own run at the validity of the review when council received a report earlier in the evening. His attempt to delay council's official receipt of the report was defeated.
The report was the city staff review of expenses, which included flagged items for many councillors, along with each council member's explanation of the items.
Those explanations ranged from pointing out the lack of clarity in city policy to new copies of bills being provided to rationalizations for buying a throw for use in council chambers.
MacKay said his review had different conclusions than the city audit, and he found instances where he believed Crouse owed more money. His numbers said Crouse should owe more than $7,300, a number he calculated by taking issue with a number of the flagged items in the staff report but also a couple of months of Crouse's pay for his role of CRB board chair before council had a policy allowing councillors to receive pay from the CRB, as well as some extra per diems MacKay said shouldn't have been paid to the mayor.
Crouse, meanwhile, has provided the Gazette with a chart that shows what he's paid back to the city and the CRB and what's been paid out to him, including a copy of a cheque for the remaining $546 he owed after the review. His review shows he'll have benefitted more than $2,000 from these reviews.
While Hughes and MacKay both questioned during different parts of the meeting how the public could accept the city-led review's results, others on council called for this matter to be put behind council.
“This goes on and on and on,” said Crouse.
Coun. Tim Osborne observed if they were to keep delaying receiving the expense review until Crouse and MacKay agree, “it's never going to happen and it's just not realistic right now.”
Coun. Cathy Heron said she wants to see the policy changes recommended by staff put into place “but to spend taxpayer dollars to continually look at the mayor's expenses and to look at what staff has done is not a good use of money or time.”
Coun. Wes Brodhead said the process included a review of the expenses, including one by the RCMP.
“The intent of the review has been answered now let's move forward,” Brodhead said.
Hughes was initially allowed to go forward with her motions wrapped up as one motion.
However, some procedural wrangling saw the motion split into two.
The motion was initially allowed despite similarity to a previous motion from October because of the addition of wording calling for a review of the review.
The procedure bylaw states a failed motion can't be renewed unless there's been an election or one year has passed.
The split left the first motion as more or less the same as the October motion.
The mayor's ruling to allow the motion was then overturned in a 4-2 vote after it was split, with the mayor voting to overturn his own ruling.
The second half, for an auditor to look over the city staff's review of all of council's expenses and the staff's recommendations, was also defeated in a 4-2 vote.
Hughes and Coun. Cam MacKay were in the minority for both votes on the auditor motions.
