Auditor General flags $1.5M in NPCA contracts
Paperwork, including payout to Niagara Region CAO, missing
Ontario’s Auditor General is investigating more than $1.5 million in Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority contracts, many of which have incomplete or missing paperwork, The Standard has learned.
Among the 40 items the provincial agency is investigating is $41,226 paid to Carmen D’Angelo — now Niagara Region chief administrative officer — for what an Auditor General document says was an “unidentifiable service.” It is also looking at $27,120 paid to a Mississauga consulting firm to help NPCA combat “nefarious sources” which had “impugned” its projects.
Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk was directed in October to investigate NPCA by the provincial public accounts committee following several years of complaints about the agency’s practices and calls from Niagara municipalities for an audit.
The document obtained by The Standard, titled “Sample Non-Conformance Factual Clearance,” identifies a list of issues the Auditor General is investigating. While it provides responses from NPCA to some issues, the document is not the final report and does not contain final conclusions or recommendations.
The audit report, which is scheduled to be presented to NPCA behind closed doors Wednesday, could be different than the factual clearance document.
Lysyk said Monday she could not discuss the document or the status of her investigation into the operations of the embattled NPCA.
The document says many contracts had little to no documentation and many of the contracts were sole-sourced without any form of competitive procurement.
A review of the document by The Standard found more than $1 million in non-competitively procured contracts dating back
to 2012. The contracts covered such things as the printing of brochures, truck rentals, and planting and purchase of large trees.
Among items under investigation was the contract with D’Angelo Performance Concepts in 2013.
D’Angelo was a member of the NPCA board and took a leave of absence from Oct. 17, 2013, to Feb. 17, 2014, the document says. During that period, he was hired by NPCA for a human resources restructuring project.
The AG document says NPCA has no documentation about the project.
“There was no proposal made by Mr. D’Angelo identifying the work he would perform, no contract signed outlining the costs, no deliverables or expectations from the work he would perform, and no deliverables provided by Mr. D’Angelo indicating what work was performed in relations to the ‘HR restructuring,’” the document says.
D’Angelo was hired as NPCA CAO in May 2014, and maintained the position until October 2016.
He did not respond to an interview request from The Standard.
Messages to NPCA were not returned Tuesday.
Another contract that was red-flagged was between NPCA and the consulting firm Kealey and Associates, which was hired to lobby on the agency’s behalf.
In early 2015, NPCA lobbied the provincial government to make Niagara a testing ground for biodiversity offsetting. A government white paper floated the notion, suggesting developers could destroy a natural habitat in one area as long a new habitat of equal or greater size gets created somewhere else. The concept was never approved by Queen’s Park.
In 2015 the NPCA lobbied for a biodiversity offsetting pilot project using lands which became known as the Thundering Waters project — a $1.4-billion development proposed by Chinese investors that would create 10,000 housing units on the southern edge of Niagara Falls. The authority hired the firm to help make its case, the document says.
The auditor general document says in 2015 Kealey and Associates proposed to help NPCA with its “proactive approach to expanding the opportunities outside of the traditional scope of conservation authorities,” to increase revenues while continuing to achieve its mandate.
Kealey and Associates recommended a strategic communications strategy and noted NPCA had “undertaken comprehensive plans for large-scale natural resource-based projects that had been ‘impugned by nefarious sources or misunderstood.’”
“They identified pressure from municipal governments … to have the province intervene or thwart efforts by the NPCA to remain an arm’s-length agency,” the document says.
The document says the only information NPCA could provide about the contract with Kealey and Associates are emails regarding meetings.
The firm was paid $3,000 per month for a period of eight months, totalling $27,120. Kealey and Associates could not be immediately reached Tuesday.
Lysyk said the release of the document to The Standard, “constitutes obstruction under (The Auditor General Act),” but did not explain how.
Section 11.2 of the act says no one “shall conceal or destroy any books, accounts, financial records, electronic data processing records, reports, files and all other papers, things or property that the Auditor General considers to be relevant to the subjectmatter of the special audit or examination.” Doing so would be obstruction and is punishable by a $2,000 fine and a year in prison.
A spokeswoman for Lysyk said Tuesday she was unable to reach the Auditor General to provide further clarity.
On Monday Lysyk said she is scheduled to appear Wednesday at a closed-door meeting of the NPCA board.
She said no date has been set for the public release of her audit report, which will be tabled at the provincial legislature.
The Auditor General is also examining NPCA’s $28, 841 purchase of a boat from Nicholls’ Marine Ltd. in Fort Erie in 2015.
On June 16, 2015, NPCA purchased the boat without a competitive procurement process. The document says NPCA said the purchase was deemed an emergency based on a drowning at Binbrook Conservation uncovered the day prior, so no competitive purchases process was used.
However, the boat was described as a sports/fishing boat and not a rescue boat and there was no policy to guide an emergency purchase.