Motion will request NPCA payouts

St. Catharines councillor looking for transparency on NPCA severance costs paid to former employees

After learning that Niagara’s former police chief was given a golden handshake worth more than $ 870,000, St. Catharines Reg. Coun. Brian Heit wondered how much the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority handed out to its former employees.

And he hopes to find out, through a motion he plans to bring forward at next week’s regional council.

Heit told fellow councillors about his pending notice of motion at Wednesday’s corporate services committee meeting, while discussing the deal the Niagara Regional Police Services Board provided former police chief Jeff McGuire.

“All of this should be public. The payouts. The severances. I will have a motion coming forward on Thursday regarding the conservation authority, about what kind of payments were made to the people who were pushed out there. I have numbers of 30 or 40, maybe even 50,” Heit said during the meeting.

Niagara Falls Coun. Selina Volpatti objected, asking “why are we talking about the conservation authority?”

But meeting chair and NPCA board member Tony Quirk ruled Heit’s statement in order.

He said he’s looking forward to amending Heit’s pending motion, and he plans to also include severance payments from local municipalities “because I think that is where we can have a larger discussion on openness and transparency about the public spending of funds.”

“Just for the record,” Quirk added, “Fifty people haven’t been laid off at the conservation authority. There are only 55 people working there. It is important if you are bringing forward motions, you get the facts right.”

Heit’s motion doesn’t provide specific numbers of NPCA staff changes.

It instead refers to “dozens of staff being fired, retiring, quitting, contracts not being extended, and or otherwise released.”

In an interview, Friday, Heit said there have likely been far more job losses at the NPCA in the past four years than a few dozen.

“I know there were more firings, more retired, more people quit than 24,” he said. “I think the number is closer to 40 or 50 people in the last four years ... but I don’t have that exact number, and that’s why the exact number would not show up in my motion.”

The motion calls on the NPCA to provide regional council with all costs incurred from 2014 to 2017 “associated with severance, including but not limited to severances, wages paid, wages paid in lieu of notice, retirement packages, arbitration, personnel court cases, bonuses, and damages.”

It requests that the information be provided by the June 6 meeting.

“My motion is really appropriate,” Heit said, adding he started writing the motion after the police chief’s severance payments were publicly released in late January.