Magliocca apologizes for ‘errors’ in travel expenses
Coun. Joe Magliocca publicly apologized Monday for “errors” in his expenses from last year’s Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference, including expensing food and drinks at meetings with elected officials who say they never sat down with him.
“Calgary taxpayers expect better from me and so does this council,” Magliocca said in council chambers. “I regret and I apologize for my error on this.”
Last week the Ward 2 councillor agreed to repay a portion of his travel expenses from the trip to the conference in Quebec City last spring after Postmedia revealed he had expensed two to three times as much as his council colleagues, including $1,800 in hosting costs.
Hosting expenses are typically incurred by council members in their meetings with external groups or agencies, and councillors are allowed to expense $100 per day. Magliocca, city council’s representative on the FCM board last year, had to submit some of his expenses through his ward office budget as well as city corporate accounts.
Magliocca told Postmedia last week that he wrote a personal cheque to the City of Calgary to repay approximately $900 worth of expenses, reimbursing all of the alcohol and a steak dinner that was previously charged to city accounts.
On Monday, Magliocca said he was repaying all alcohol and hosting costs from FCM, to the tune of about $2,100.
Mayor Naheed Nenshi said it’s important that council members don’t treat the task of documenting meetings with other officials “cavalierly.”
“It’s not a private sector job here. It’s different. We have an entrusted authority that we have to be very careful with, and we’ve got to keep our nose clean on stuff like that all the time,” he said.
Despite that responsibility, the mayor said there isn’t much more oversight needed as long as councillors adhere to the city’s existing rules around transparency and disclosure.
“Councillors really have to come to the point of saying, ‘Look, there is a code of conduct. It does govern my decisions even though there’s not a lot of teeth to it under the law. It has to govern my activities and my actions every day.’”
Ten council members, including Magliocca, attended FCM, expensing an average of $3,200 each. But Magliocca expensed $6,400 for the trip. At least four elected officials listed on receipts submitted by Magliocca said they didn’t have meals or drinks purchased by him, despite being listed on his receipts.
One of those officials, Chestermere Coun. Yvette Kind, said she filed a complaint with Calgary city council’s integrity commissioner Friday after she found her name, along with several other politicians, attached to a $331 bar tab at the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac.
Magliocca admitted late Friday that he came back from the conference with “hundreds of business cards” and “clearly mixed up some of my receipts.”
He publicly apologized Monday to the people he listed and said he has been attempting to contact them personally.
Magliocca added that last year he cut more than $20,000 from his office budget, “and this year I am aiming to trim my office budget even more to go further to demonstrate my commitment to fiscal conservative responsibility.”
He added that in the future, he will no longer expense any alcohol to city accounts.