Waltham

Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter

Investigation finds ethical and professional breaches by former DG

An investigation conducted by Quebec’s municipal commission (CMQ) has found the former director general of the Municipality of Waltham contravened the province’s municipal code in multiple ways during his near 40 years at the administrative helm of the town.

The director general in question, who has requested he not be named in this article and who was not referred to by name in the commission’s findings, began his tenure with the municipality in 1985 and resigned in February 2024, around the time the CMQ began its investigation.

The full report that came of this investigation was published, only in French, on Aug. 16 (https://tinyurl.com/4z2f3hzc).

It states the director general’s management and governance of the municipality led to an organizational and administrative failure of the municipal office, and allowed him to implement irregular practices that favoured his personal interests at the expense of the municipality’s.

His actions, the report states, were in serious breach of ethical and professional standards that are to be adhered to by municipal employees and led to an abusive use of funds of a public body.

These actions include his practice of getting mayors to sign collections of blank cheques without invoices attached; his failure to ensure employee contracts were created for people working for the municipality; his creation of a job for his wife, for which the municipality paid her an annual salary for work she did from home; and his failure to maintain a proper system of documentation of all municipal paperwork, which made it very difficult for the investigation to track any of these breaches.

The commission concludes the former director general used the municipality’s resources for personal purposes and that through his actions, he took advantage of both his status at the municipality and the council’s trust in him.

The former director general declined to be interviewed for this article but in a statement to THE EQUITY he said he disagrees “with the factual findings and the conclusions included in the report.”

“I do not intend to openly contest all of the allegations that I consider wrong and defamatory against me and my wife,” he wrote.

The investigation found that the former director general’s governance of the municipality relied entirely on the trust of the elected officials in his work, and on his word.

The report states he did not adequately inform councils over the years, the members of which did not understand their own roles and responsibilities as elected officials.

In this context, the report says, the director general was able to make decisions which the council supported without questioning.

The CMQ investigation was triggered when, in the fall of 2023, an external audit report of the municipality’s finances became known to elected officials after current mayor Odette Godin reached out to the auditor with some questions.

Mayor Godin said when she was elected in the fall of 2021, after eight years as councillor for the municipality, she learned the director general had a stack of blank cheques that had been signed by the previous mayor before he left office that were being used to make municipal payments.

She said this struck her as problematic, but at the time, she did not challenge the practice, and when the director general ran out of previously signed cheques, she signed the next batch he presented her.
“Nobody wants to rock the boat right off the bat,” Godin said. “If you asked questions, you got knocked back pretty quickly with, ‘Well that’s just the way it’s done.’”

The report details that when Godin expressed her discomfort with the practice and put an end to it, the director general pushed back, maintaining that her refusal to sign in advance would likely cause the municipality charges for late payments and that he would hold her personally responsible, if necessary.

In his statement to THE EQUITY, the former director general said the blank cheques were “always used to pay for legitimate expenses that were approved by the municipality’s council” and that “this was done only to facilitate the payment process and avoid unnecessary delays.”

But the CMQ makes clear in its report that signing blank cheques should be prohibited as it undermines a mayor’s ability to fulfill their responsibility, as outlined in the municipal act, to guarantee that public funds are used in accordance with the law.

Mayor Godin said that, at a later date, when she requested to see a list of all the municipality’s employees, she was surprised to learn the director general’s wife was on the list, something she said she had never been aware of in her eight years as councillor.

The investigation confirmed it appears the former director general’s wife received a salary from the municipality for almost 10 years, and one that was higher than some employees who had been employed by the municipality for longer periods of time.

The CMQ states its investigation could not confirm the DG’s wife was officially employed by the municipality by way of resolution, employment contract, employee file or performance evaluations, and that the issuance of municipal cheques in her name is the only existing evidence linking her to the municipality.

According to the report, the director general and his wife said she did indeed work for Waltham, entirely from home, performing duties that they described as sorting and preparing municipal mail.

The budget item to pay her for this work was listed under “urban planning” according to the report.

After several years of frustrations around what seemed to Godin to be a lack of transparency around the municipality’s governance, she reached out to an external auditor to get some answers.

“When I started discovering things, I immediately thought of the welfare of the municipality, and that is the only reason I stepped forward,” Godin told THE EQUITY.

“I knew what was going on. I promise you I tried to work with [him] just to get things back on track. Nobody else had to be involved,” Godin added, expressing her desire to resolve matters internally. She said when she raised her concerns with him, she felt as though he was patting her on the head in a dismissive way as he told her not to worry about it.

“When I questioned him, he was very passive aggressive.”

The former director general, for his part, claims he was never informed that some of the municipality’s administrative procedures were flawed.

“In all of my years of service to the municipality before the audit in Sept. 2023, I was never informed that some of our administrative procedures were flawed and/or that some changes were required,” he wrote in his statement. “If I had been informed of an irregularity, I would have made the necessary changes to make sure that everything was done correctly.”

The Sept. 2023 audit report did indeed offer evidence of flawed practices, pointing to several deficiencies and questioning the hiring of the director general’s wife.

In October 2023, he presented council with her letter of resignation, written by himself.

The CMQ investigation noted that following this resignation, the director general presented a resolution to council to increase his salary by the amount that was paid to his wife. Godin vetoed this resolution, which was not adopted, however the director general’s budget was still substantially increased in the following budget, which he prepared himself.

In Waltham’s 2023 municipal budget, available to the public on the municipality’s website, $77,403 are allotted to “urban planning and regional development.” In that same budget, the director general’s salary is listed as $49,000.

In the 2024 municipal budget, prepared in 2023, only $44,078 is allotted to the urban planning department, while the director general’s salary is listed as $79,560, an increase of $30,560 which is only $2,765 less than the difference in both years’ urban planning budgets.

“My employment conditions and those of my wife were known and approved by the members of the previous councils,” the former director general wrote in his statement to THE EQUITY. “I have never tried to hide or obtain payment for any expense that was not to the benefit of the municipality.”

Report holds previous mayors, councillors accountable

Beyond the blank cheques and the hiring of his wife, the former director general committed a list of other infractions, according to the investigation, including potential abuse of the municipality’s vacation pay system; charging home expenses to the municipality as business expenses incurred from working at home; and charging the municipality a monthly fee for rental of a computer that he purchased, and continuing to charge this fee well after the cost of the computer had been paid off.

This was all made possible, according to the report, because councillors were kept in the dark on how money was moving through the municipality, and did not properly understand their roles and responsibilities as elected officials.

The report indicates, in fact, that the auditor’s annual offer, made to the director general, to present the external audit to council was never actually shared with council, and so councillors may have never seen an external audit.

The CMQ’s investigations are damning, holding not only the director general responsible for a serious breach of ethical and professional standards, a serious case of mismanagement within a public body and misuse of public body funds, but also, indirectly, the previous mayors and municipal councillors.

“The municipal councils until today, and more particularly, the mayors in place until the November 2021 elections, have allowed these reprehensible acts to be committed,” the report states, translated from French.

The report also notes that the mayor, referring to Mayor Godin, “despite the opposition she may have encountered, behaved as she was supposed to. She fulfilled her duties of surveillance and investigation in accordance with the Act, questioned non-recommended practices and had a desire to follow up on the recommendations of the external auditor.”

Godin said after reading the report last week, she was relieved.

“Everything I suspected was proven, but I paid. I paid dearly, for bringing all this to light. I hope that people see that what I did, I did for them.”

She said she has heard people in the community ask whether the municipality will be pressing charges, but she said she doesn’t think this will be possible.

“We’re not going to be able to lay charges against [him] or recoup any money because nobody can prove how much and when it started. There’s no paper trail, the report mentioned that.”

Now, the municipality’s current director general, Annik Plante, is saddled with restoring some form of organization and proper municipal procedures to a governing body that has been operating with neither for four decades.

The CMQ recommended the municipality hire the human resources needed to support Plante in this task, and will appoint an overseer to ensure the municipality works to correct the problems identified in the report, which will be officially presented to council at its next meeting on Sept. 3.

“We will follow the recommendations from the CMQ,” Godin said.