INTEGRITY COMPLAINT
City, Musyj probe urged
A Windsor woman says she’s filed a complaint with the city ’s integrity commissioner against city council, after Windsor Regional Hospital CEO David Musyj was appointed to a new committee examining how much councillors should be paid.
Caroline Taylor opposes the plan for Windsor’s new acute care “mega-hospital” to be located on farmland opposite Windsor Airport and is a member of Citizens for an Accountable Megahospital Planning Process. The local group want the new hospital in the city ’s core. Having the mega-hospital’s main player, Musyj, make recommendations on possible pay raises for councillors around the time that council makes a critical decision on the rezoning application for the 60-acre hospital site “is so wrong,” Taylor said Tuesday as she filed her complaint with integrity commissioner Bruce Elman. “And it’s time we stepped up as citizens and called them on it.” Taylor contends that council violated its code of conduct when it appointed Musyj to the new council compensation review committee earlier this month. The committee is supposed to meet and come up with recommendations by July.
“It’s definitely a conflict of interest,” she said. “Here they have hired the CEO of Windsor Regional Hospital to be a volunteer and sit and discuss what their pay raises should be in the future and he also has an item coming up in the near future,” to rezone the hospital land. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” she said sarcastically, suggesting that Musyj could recommend a pay raise for councillors and councillors could turn around and approve his rezoning.
“They should have known better than to appoint someone with an agenda item coming up in the near future.”
Mayor Drew Dilkens couldn’t be reached on Tuesday to discuss the complaint, now the fourth known complaint filed in the last several weeks after councillors endorsed a report by Elman that concluded Coun. Rino Bortolin violated the code of conduct when he made hypothetical comments last year about a rape in an alley. Elman doesn’t discuss ongoing complaints. He charges $300 an hour to investigate them.
The code of conduct contains six rules about conflict of interest, including: “Members shall not use their positions to further their private interests, nor shall they vote on any issue at council or committee that puts them in a real or apparent conflict with their personal finances.”
Any changes to compensation would be approved by the current council, but would take effect Jan. 1, 2019 as the new council takes over following the Oct. 22 election.
The volunteers, who all submitted applications after the city made a public appeal in April, are: Musyj, local lawyer David Amyot, St. Clair College president Patti France, retired former City of Windsor solicitor George Wilkki and Toni Scislowski, a work transition specialist at the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board who sits on the Windsor Airport board. When contacted about the complaint, Musyj vehemently denied he was volunteering on the committee to gain some sort of advantage as the rezoning decision looms.
“Of course not, give me a break. No, not at all,” he said, explaining that he had recently moved to the city from the county and was trying to make a contribution. With decades of experience figuring out fair compensation for hospital employees, he felt he had could help out, he said.
If anyone with a matter before council can’t be on this board, that would eliminate a lot of candidates, he said, including a lawyer like Amyot whose law firm may represent clients who deal with the city, and France, who sits on Windsor Regional Hospital’s board. The rezoning is expected to come before council in the next several months.
They (council) should have known better than to appoint someone with an agenda item coming up in the near future.