City CAO trashes talk of conflict in former civic manager’s new private-sector job

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/02/2018 (2797 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s chief administrative and operating officers say they aren’t concerned about the city’s former solid waste manager taking a job with a company he helped secure a multimillion-dollar deal for.

Daryl Doubleday left the public sector in January to work for Green For Life (GFL) Environmental Inc.

Doubleday was one of four city administrators who created a request for proposal and reviewed bids for two seven-year garbage-removal contracts that took effect last fall. One contract went to GFL and the other went to Miller Waste Systems. Together the contracts are worth about $24.8 million annually.

“The people that remain in the solid waste division are well aware of what the terms are of that contract, and any discussions that we have with Daryl or anybody else with (GFL) will be about those terms of the contract,” CAO Doug McNeil told reporters Tuesday.

GFL’s successful bid for the garbage-removal contract was about $9.7 million, significantly lower — about $5 million less — than its counterparts. McNeil said that wasn’t a red flag.

“We get this all the time in all the tenders that we put up. Sometimes some contractors (bid) much lower than others. We can speculate as to why that is, but we don’t know what they’re thinking when they’re putting those bids together,” he said, noting the city can reject bids it thinks are unrealistically low.

Chief operating officer Michael Jack told the Free Press Doubleday approached his director immediately after accepting a job with GFL, giving his notice Dec. 1. That month, Doubleday signed a confidentiality agreement to prevent him from disclosing details of his time at the city to his new employer.

“Daryl on his own recognized the potential optics of leaving for GFL, who of course is one of our large contractors, and so it was at that point that those discussions occurred,” Jack said.

Other recently-departed civil servants weren’t asked to sign similar confidentiality agreements because the city wasn’t sure where they were going to be working next, Jack added. If Doubleday’s agreement was breached, city lawyers “would simply have to consider what our remedies are,” he said, refusing to discuss further what those remedies might be and if they would include legal action.

“Thankfully he has not (breached the contract). Daryl’s a stand-up guy of the utmost integrity and that hasn’t been an issue,” Jack said.

Doubleday has yet to respond to media calls asking about why he left his city job for GFL.

McNeil said he didn’t think there was anything questionable about the timing of Doubleday’s exit, a concern which Coun. Janice Lukes (South Winnipeg-St. Norbert) raised with the Free Press Monday.

“I think that those are false accusations,” he said. “There’s always a concern and, of course, you know the province has legislation with respect to a cooling-off period for senior officials, and it applies to ministers, deputy ministers and assistant deputy ministers, but not executive directors and below.

“So if we were to do something like that (cooling-off period) at the city, I would see that applying to myself, to my chief level and to directors of departments, not managers and below. Daryl was a manager.”

Mayor Brian Bowman introduced a motion last fall calling for the province to impose a one-year cooling-off period for former councillors and mayors, restricting them from certain employment activities and lobbying. The motion is under review.

Bowman told reporters last Friday he was “open to ideas and discussion with regards to a cooling-off period also applying to members of the public service.”

Sherri Walsh, the city’s first integrity commissioner, works part-time covering city hall matters, which included an appearance at the monthly executive policy committee meeting Tuesday to discuss her new proposed code of conduct for members of council.

While Walsh’s mandate doesn’t include investigating matters in the civil service, she said she would be open to giving department heads legal advice.

Paul Thomas, a retired political studies professor from the University of Manitoba, said it’s important for the city to give Walsh a long leash, but he doesn’t think her mandate should be expanded to include civic employees, or at least not before her code of conduct passes a council vote.

“Let’s get this (code) going first … before saying we have to jump to the next phase and get a watchdog who will not only bark, but bite when civic employees do something wrong,” Thomas said.

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @_jessbu