Clean slate after much controversy
Mayor with the CSI-style bathroom wall ousted in favour of Iain Lovatt
Following a heated election campaign in WhitchurchStouffville fraught with social media drama, election sign misdeeds and court cases, the message emanating from incoming mayor Iain Lovatt and the new council is it’s time to move on after a chaotic four years.
“We need to turn the page and move forward,” he said after voters ousted Mayor Justin Altmann on Monday night. “The last four years have been way too much drama and distraction.”
Lovatt had 5,329 votes, Keith Acton was nearly 1,000 votes behind with 4,421, while Altmann came in third with 3,060. Anand Daté was fourth with 1,260.
Lovatt’s supporters packed the King’s Landing on Monday to celebrate the victory. Spontaneous chants of “Lovatt! Lovatt!” rang out as they celebrated a hard-fought campaign.
“I’m incredibly humbled,” Lovatt told the crowd. “I did not anticipate it would be like this.”
Lovatt will helm a council that looks a lot like the old one — minus Altmann and Ward 6 Councillor Rob Hargrave. Incumbents Ken Ferdinands, Maurice Smith, Hugo Kroon and Rick Upton were all reelected. The two new members of council — Richard Bartley in Ward 5 and Sue Sherban in Ward 6 — are no strangers to the dais. The vote ends a tumultuous council term marred by high-profile staff departures, multiple integrity commissioner investigations and legal battles between Altmann and the town.
In 2015, past chief administrative officer Andrew McNeely and assistant Concetta Connolly were put on administrative leave and eventually resigned. There was no discussion about the reasons for the resignations at the time in council. The CAO who followed McNeely, Marc Pourvahidi, wasn’t long for the job, either.
The town sacked Pourvahidi in 2016 after he was put on leave earlier in the year.
Pourvahidi had been on administrative leave since April 2016 due to a “personnel matter,” as stated by a town news release. The duration of his leave was written as “unknown,” leaving the town without an official CAO for seven months.
Pourvahidi’s leave of absence — first stated as sick leave — followed a revelation that the town had an exodus of 30 employees from January 2015 to April 2016. There was high drama at a council meeting toward the end of 2016, when the town restricted the use of the mayor’s chain of office after some councillors grew upset about what they perceived as Altmann’s liberal use of the chain at events, such as his wedding. In 2017, integrity Commissioner Suzanne Craig investigated a CSI- style photo wall in Altmann’s office washroom that included pictures of staff, former politicians and members of the public linked together with black lines and graphics.
Craig’s report found that the wall was “vexatious and disturbing.”