Rigby won’t bill taxpayers for mileage
Tim Rigby doesn’t think you should have to pay for him to drive to work.
For three years, the St. Catharines regional councillor hasn’t filed for so much as a dime of public money on his expense sheets.
He did not make the public pay for a single meal, or for souvenirs or for the mileage to get to a council session or meeting.
He certainly could. Council’s expense policy permits councillors to bill the taxpayer for such things as mileage, charitable donations, event tickets and even tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
But Rigby isn’t having any part of it.
“I don’t think the public should be paying for me to drive to council,” Rigby said in an interview Friday.
“Nobody else gets paid to go to work, why should we?”
A review of councillor expense data — released last week on Niagaraopendata. ca — shows Rigby’s phone bills for 2015, 2016 and 2017, but expenses for those years are absent.
“Well, that’s because I didn’t file anything,” Rigby said. “As I said, I don’t think the public needs to pay for me to go to work. I have a salary for that. And I didn’t go to any conferences either. Now, there is one I would like to attend this year, so that might come up on my expenses later.”
Rigby’s phone bills range from a low of $ 17 a month to a high of about $ 73. In January 2015, Rigby’s bill shows a bill of over $ 5,094 due to roaming charges. A notation on the bill shows the charges were incorrect and the councillor received a 75 per cent credit for those charges on his March bill.
Incorrect roaming charges have been an ongoing issue for councillors. Some councillors such as Rigby, Sandy Annunziata from Fort Erie and David Barrick from Port Colborne have had thousands of dollars of roaming charges removed from their bills.
Mileage is by far the most common item on councillor expenses, with some politicians logging every trip to and from regional headquarters for council sessions and meetings. Many councillors also claim mileage for driving to events they attend.
Some, such as Annunziata, claim mileage for out- of- town events. Annunziata has claimed thousands of dollars for driving to Toronto appear regularly on Newstalk 1010 AM radio, and once expensed a trip to Hamilton for a charity event that benefits the Hamilton chapter of the Alzheimer Society.
The Region’s policy allows councillors to claim expenses for mileage for anything deemed to be part of their official capacity. It appears it is up to each councillor to decide what constitutes that official capacity.
“The policy has been this way for years, but maybe it is time for it to be more prescriptive because people seem to be more concerned about it,” said St. Catharines Coun. Bruce Timms in an interview Monday.
Timms’ own expenses are typical of most councillors, containing mileage to Region meetings, as well as expenses for conferences.
One particular item is unusual. In 2016, Timms was one of several regional councillors to attend the annual Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference in Winnipeg. The expense report shows he paid this $ 638 hotel bill for his threenight stay in Winnipeg with a Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority credit card.
Timms told The Standard that his regular credit card was “unavailable” at the time, so he paid with the NPCA card. The records show Timms filed the hotel bill on his regional expenses.
The councillor said he personally repaid the NPCA and while the incident was “an inconvenience and a little bit embarrassing, we got it straightened out.”
However, Timms also said NPCA should not pay for anything related to the Region. Although the agency’s governing board of directors — of which Timms is a member and its former chair — is dominated by Niagara Region councillors, it has long maintained it is not an official arm of the local municipality.
It recently carried that argument into the courtroom in its failed defamation suit against local activist Ed Smith when the authority argued NPCA is not a government agency at all. The presiding judge, in dismissing NPCA’s case, rejected the argument as “not tenable.”
A review of Timms’ NPCA and regional expenses from 2016 shows no other overlap between what he filed with the municipality and the agency.
Several questions about regional councillor expenses remain unanswered as some councillors have declined to speak about how they are spending the public’s money. Among them are:
• Regional Chair Alan Caslin’s
expenses contain no supporting receipts or documentation and omit any information about where he is expensing his meals — sometimes for more than $ 200 for a meeting with a single constituent. He has declined multiple interview requests since expenses were made public on Jan 16. Caslin issued an emailed statement on Jan. 17 that said each councillor has to comment on their own expenses. In the email he touted the Canada Summer Games and the GE plant in Welland as political successes and said voters can judge his expenses against his record.
He has not said why he won’t
discuss his expenses, nor how the Summer Games, GE or other issues relate to the information in the released documents. The Standard continues to seek an interview with the chair on the subject.
• In December 2016 St.
Catharines Coun. Andy Petrowski racked up a $ 17,000 smartphone bill due to roaming charges incurred while transmitting more than 1,100 megabytes of data through his phone while in the Caribbean and the U. S. Petrowski has declined requests for interviews and the Region has not responded to questions about what became of that bill. There are no notations on the bill to indicate if the taxpayer, Petrowski or the service provider paid the bill.
• Annunziata has so far
declined to answer questions about whether he will continue to claim mileage for driving to Toronto to appear on Newstalk 1010 AM. The expense data released last week show he hadn’t claimed mileage for appearing on the show in months. The Standard asked Annunizata if he will continue to bill the public for his mileage to Newstalk, and if not, why not. In an email the councillor defended his use of the expense policy and said he will continue to follow it. He appeared twice this month on Newstalk as a guest, on Jan. 9 and Jan. 16.