City integrity boss pushes to ease public complaints
After more than a year in new post, citizens still have no direct access
Citizens can’t directly lodge complaints with city hall’s integrity commissioner more than a year after he was hired on the public dime to probe grievances about elected officials.
After 15 months on the job spent investigating far fewer complaints from citizens than he anticipated, Allen Sulatycky said he wants a designated email address Calgarians can use to send him concerns about the mayor and city councillors.
“It’s crazy the hoops they have to jump through,” Sulatycky said.
“I’d prefer to have citizens be able to complain directly to the office of the integrity commissioner . . . it should be as simple as possible.”
Ward 13 Coun. Diane Colley- Urquhart has discussed the matter with Sulatycky and agrees a clear method for citizens to contact a man hired to improve council transparency is immediately needed.
“I was shocked that this would be so difficult, that there wouldn’t be a direct line of sight to him, either through email or hotline or whatever,” she said.
Historically, complaints from citizens about council behaviour or about city employees and operations were made through the city auditor’s whistleblower program by telephone, email, mail or a confidential online reporting service.
But complaints specifically about elected officials now fall under the new office after retired judge Sulatycky was appointed in April 2016 alongside university professor Alice Woolley, to keep a watchful eye on council as the city’s first integrity commissioner and ethics adviser.
Sulatycky was tasked with probing allegations against council members, while Woolley was hired to instruct elected officials of any potential pitfalls or conflicts of interest — positions expected to lift a fog of secrecy that long shrouded the complaint system against city council.
The part-time gigs, which each come with a $200 hourly salary and a $2,000 monthly retainer, were filled after a year-long hunt to find watchdogs following allegations of misconduct by some elected officials.
Since starting the role 15 months ago, Sulatycky said he’s received 17 complaints about elected officials, split almost evenly between complaints filed by citizens and complaints brought forward by council members about each other.
He said the complaints from citizens have been forwarded to him through the whistleblower program because the city hasn’t set up a designated way for citizens to reach him, a process he’s been told must go to council for approval.
“People are directed on the website to go through the whistleblower program, and that is an impediment in some cases,” he said.
Ward 10 Coun. Andre Chabot agreed and said he’s heard from citizens confused about how to make complaints about council members.
“It should be very transparent and easy for people to be able to access that system,” he said.
Ward 8 Coun. Evan Woolley (no relation to ethics adviser Alice Woolley) said anything that can be done to improve Sulatycky’s newly created position, which is a first for a western Canadian city, is worth exploring.
“If he has suggestions to make it more transparent, to make himself more accessible, then we should absolutely be having those conversations,” Woolley said.
Of the 17 complaints investigated, Sulatycky’s only ruling released publicly by the city is a report concerning comments Mayor Naheed Nenshi made about ride-share company Uber.
Sulatycky said that’s because unless a complaint is substantiated, as the mayor’s comments in Boston were, no report goes to council and there is no public record of the incident beyond being included as a statistic in annual reports — that is unless councillors make Sulatycky’s correspondence public, as Colley-Urquhart did in November on Twitter when she posted a two-page letter from Sulatycky that cleared her of any wrongdoing for tweets she posted about the police service.
Colley-Urquhart said no matter what Sulatycky’s investigation found, she would have released his letter about her conduct and believes “unequivocally” that more details about all of the complaints filed to date should be made public.
“This is what brings distrust to the political process, when people play cat and mouse with these things,” she said.
Sulatycky said he’s found two complaints from council members had some basis and referred them to the ethics adviser, where they were resolved through a mediation process. None of the complaints from citizens has been substantiated.
At least five of the complaints from elected officials concern “distracting or intimidating” conduct during recent council meetings, including a stabbing gesture Ward 1 Coun. Ward Sutherland made in May, according to a June letter from Sulatycky to members of council that was leaked to the press.
“I expected (complaints from council) to be concentrated in the period of May, June, July, prior to the election when the councillors are jockeying for advantage or trying to make sure the person they don’t agree ideologically with has a more difficult chance getting reelected,” Sulatycky said. “Those complaints did come up and I attribute it partly to election anxiety.”