City hall lacks courage, accountability

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/07/2016 (3389 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Getting information from city hall is a real chore.

From meddlesome communications staff trying to slow down or scuttle requests, to politicians and senior mandarins with a penchant for playing hide and seek, access to essential information about how and why the city does what it does is at an all-time low.

We suffered through one of the most egregious examples of this trend earlier this month when the city refused to reveal the circumstances surrounding a $567,000 severance payment to former interim-CAO Deepak Joshi. Although his termination was clearly botched at the highest levels of city hall, no one had the courage to step up and explain the context of that payout. As a result, citizens are left wondering who or what went wrong.

If only that were the sole example of the city cowering when the going gets tough.

More recently, there are overtime problems at Winnipeg Transit. As revealed last week in the Free Press, transit mechanics are working so much overtime one pulled down a few thousand dollars less than Transit director Dave Wardrop.

Think about that. Wardrop makes about $175,000 a year. Several transit mechanics and technicians earned more than $125,000.

How this has happened remains a bit of a mystery. We have been told the mechanics are doubling their salaries by working overtime. We also know at least some of this work is related to troublesome Cummins diesel bus engines constantly breaking down. But still, we don’t really know why the overtime bill has risen so much, and what the city is doing about it.

It’s not for lack of trying. Aldo Santin, the Free Press city hall bureau chief, attempted to get to the bottom of the matter. Remarkably, given the story’s high profile and obvious relevance to taxpayers, city staff engaged in what can only be described as administrative civil disobedience.

Information trickled out in a series of email responses to questions the Free Press posed. An interview with Wardrop was denied. The information provided only raised a whole new raft of questions.

For example, we found out in addition to all the overtime, Winnipeg Transit is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to Cummins for the repair of the aforementioned unreliable diesel engines. And the union representing Winnipeg Transit mechanics claims the rate paid to Cummins mechanics is nearly four times what a city mechanic makes.

Lamentably, the city does not have enough mechanics on staff to do the work. Winnipeg Transit was given budgetary permission to employ 118 Winnipeg Transit mechanics this year. However, at last count the city had only 56 Red Seal mechanics and 30 apprentices on the payroll. Perhaps because of the inability to recruit or retain enough mechanics, a huge amount of repair work is being contracted out at premium rates. The city is trying to find a new contractor to bring down these costs, but it is unclear whether that is a true solution, or just a way of hiding the real costs.

What do we still not know? We don’t know why the city is operating well below its approved complement of mechanics. Previous Free Press stories have established the city is paying well below market wages for skilled mechanics. Are we being penny-wise and pound foolish by keeping pay low and using overtime and premium pay contractors? Why is the city on the hook for diesel engines that appear to be dysfunctional?

And the biggest unanswered question of all: what, if anything, is the city going to do about this?

City councillors seemed to be in the dark. Coun. Janice Lukes, usually one of the smarter cookies at city hall, admitted she had no idea what was going on. “I hope there is a very good explanation,” she said, seemingly unconcerned she didn’t already have the explanation.

Mayor Brian Bowman, he of the pledge to increase accountability and transparency, seemed unconcerned. Bowman told the CBC he was happy the mechanics were able to put in the extra hours to get the repairs done. He also said he would welcome any plan to reduce OT as long as it did not impact transit service.

Bowman’s response was horrifyingly nonchalant. For a mayor who has embraced the concept of open government and has pledged to find millions of dollars in cost savings through innovation and efficiency, this is an odd tack to take. Fixing the mess at Winnipeg Transit is, if nothing else, an opportunity to get a much bigger bang out of taxpayer funds.

This huge and costly problem has the potential to seriously undermine confidence in Winnipeg Transit at a time when the city and other levels of government are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a rapid-transit expansion. The lack of urgency on this file is foolish and cowardly.

There is no shortage of hyperbole at city hall about the importance of transparency and accountability. However, those pledges tend to be uttered in the spaces between the stories of incompetence, failure or poor judgment. You know, when there is no specific issue that requires illumination.

Before you can have an open and accountable government, you have to have the courage to reveal the truth of a matter while the controversy is still burning.

That courage, it would appear, is what is really lacking at city hall these days.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca