Candidates call for CAO to be fired
Goulborne, Augustyn and Beam say Carmen D’Angelo needs to go
Candidates running to become the next chair of Niagara Region say the time has come to fire
Chief Administrative Officer Carmen D’Angelo.
On Friday, former Welland Mayor Damian Goulbourne, Pelham Mayor Dave Augustyn and Niagara Falls businessman John (Ringo) Beam all said regional council needs replace the controversial top bureaucrat.
Goulbourne and Beam say they will seek D’Angelo’s termination if they win the October election. Augystyn said while he would also seek to replace the CAO, he said regional council should debate D’Angelo’s fate during next week’s council meeting.
Current regional chair and candidate Alan Caslin did not respond to interview requests Friday.
The calls for D’Angelo’s termination follows the release of the Ontario Ombudsman’s report on the Region’s illegal seizure of Standard reporter Bill Sawchuck’s computer and notes in December, and a lawyer’s report on the 2016 CAO hiring process.
The report by Ontario Ombudsman Paul Dube says D’Angelo was the key decision-maker, along with Caslin, that directed the seizure of Sawchuk’s computer and notes and his expulsion from regional headquarters during a Dec. 7, 2017 council meeting.
Dube’s report, released Wednesday, made 14 recommendations, including one calling on the Region to formally apologize to Sawchuk during an open council meeting.
Former Standard editor-inchief Peter Conradi, who now works in New Brunswick, took to Twitter Friday to ask candidates running for chair if they would seek to fire the CAO.
In 2015, D’Angelo told Paul Godfrey — the president of Postmedia, the then owner of The Standard — that the newspaper’s managers should be replaced.
Conradi was the editor-in-chief at the time and Godfrey made no move to fire him.
Goulbourne was the first to reply to Conradi, saying he would move to have D’Angelo fired if elected.
“The evidence that the recruitment process was clearly tainted & the recent finding of the #Ombudsman ... upon #evidence based decision making my answer Peter is ...YES.,” he tweeted.
In an interview with The Standard, Goulbourne said he has no personal issues with D’Angelo who he worked well with at the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority.
However, he said D’Angelo’s role in the Dec. 7 incident betrays a serious failure in leadership. Politicians rely on the advice of municipal staff when faced with a crisis. D’Angelo failed to provide that critical advice, he said, resulting in Dube’s findings that the Region’s actions were illegal.
Goulbourne also found the
answers D’Angelo gave to lawyer Marvin Huberman, hired to investigate the tainted 2016 CAO hiring process, to be “disturbing.”
Huberman wrote that D’Angelo could not recall if he received a digital memo containing the names and biographies of other CAO candidates in 2016 because his phone was stolen and he could not and check past emails.
The Standard wrote about the leak of the memo to D’Angelo in April, triggering the Huberman probe which cleared the process of wronging doing. However, Huberman did not have the digital documents The Standard obtained. Further investigation by the paper has found D’Angelo downloaded the memo, written by Caslin’s policy director Robert D’Amboise on Sept. 20, 2016, almost a month before he was interviewed.
D’Angelo was hired on Oct. 31, 2016.
“I check my emails on my phone all the time. But you know what? If something happened to my phone, I can go to my desktop computer and check my emails there,” he said. “People have more questions than they had before the report.”
Goulbourne said the chair cannot unilaterally fire a CAO, but if elected, he would seek support from council to do so.
Augustyn said he would also move to have D’Angelo fired, but council should deal with D’Angelo’s fate during Thursday’s council meeting.
“I’ve been consistent. I voted against CAO hiring b/c not qualified & cronyism by enablers (NPCA/Police Board),” Augustyn tweeted.
“With Ombudsman’s ruling of illegal seizure of reporter’s laptop, he must go now.”
Augustyn conceded that no councillor moved to stop chaos, but said the ultimate responsibility to maintain order during a meeting lays with the chair and the CAO.
Beam said he is deeply troubled by the actions of council.
However, he said the decision to fire the CAO cannot be taken lightly and it is an issue that the next council should tackle after the October election.
“This is the kind of decision that the entire council needs to be involved in,” he said.
D’Angelo did not respond to an interview requests from The Standard Friday.