Niagara Region releases two decades of expense reports
Niagara Region dumped thousands of pages of councillor expense reports online Tuesday afternoon going back 20 years.
Published on Niagaraopendata.ca at about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, the reports include monthly expenses for councillors from 2010 to part of 2017 and annual summaries of councillor salaries and expenses dating back to 1997.
The release of the volumes of records is the result of a freedom of information request filed by Regional Chair Alan Caslin in October.
Caslin made his FOI request to the Region’s information office after The Standard published stories about how councillors spend tax dollars, including billing taxpayers thousands of dollars for mileage to appear on a Toronto radio show, expensing donations to local charities made in their name, and racking up thousands of dollars in cellphone bills.
On Sept. 28, The Standard filed an FOI request for all councillors expenses and supporting documentation for this term of council, which began on Dec. 11, 2014.
Caslin filed his request on Oct. 2, asking for records going back 20 years.
On Oct. 5, the Region sent a letter to The Standard asking the paper to put its request on hold so that Caslin’s request could be processed first.
The Standard denied the request and the Region, in turn, denied The Standard’s FOI request saying the documents the paper asked for will be published on Jan. 16.
The Standard appealed the decision to the provincial privacy commissioner. The appeal process’s first step involves an attempted mediation, which did not resolve the issue. The next step is to proceed to adjudication.
The paper will decide how it will proceed once an analysis of the records released Tuesday is completed.
Standard journalists have begun to examine the two decades’ worth of records and will continue to publish stories about how councillors are spending tax dollars.