Confidentiality leak costs Guelph deputy CAO job
The City of Guelph “has ended its employment relationship” with its deputy chief administrative officer of corporate services.
The city’s decision to terminate Mark Amorosi follows “an unintentional disclosure of information in which personal information was inadvertently disclosed to a third party,” said a city hall news release Thursday morning.
The release did not name Bruce Poole as the third party. Poole, the city’s former longtime chief building official, filed a $1-million wrongful dismissal lawsuit against the city early last year.
In an affidavit related to the suit Poole filed in court late last month, Poole said he’d received from the city’s lawyers a USB stick containing many thousands of confidential and personal city hall emails that aren’t connected to the case. He got them in response to his requests for city documents that he wanted as part of the lawsuit’s discovery process. He devoted several pages of the affidavit to detailing the confidential documents he’d been given, including about 30 performance reviews of city hall staff.
The affidavit describes Poole’s demands for city documents over a period of months last year that led to the inadvertent disclosure of the confidential material. It says Poole’s lawyer was told in October that the city was “further reviewing its records by having its IT department run a scan.”
In an apologetic public statement on Feb. 3, city chief administrative officer Derrick Thomson said the electronic media used by the city to deliver the requested files “also inadvertently included files not relevant to this litigation that had been deleted, but not permanently erased.” Thomson said the city planned to seek a court order to get these files back, as they hadn’t been returned voluntarily.
The city’s news release Thursday morning suggested Amorosi was being held responsible for the inadvertent release, which were mostly from the work email account of former senior city employee Al Horsman.
Amorosi, who lives in Hamilton, had been Guelph’s deputy chief administrative officer of corporate services since late 2014. In this role, he has overseen the city’s finance and human resources departments, as well as overseeing corporate project management, business optimization, corporate communications and customer service, the city clerk’s department and the information technology department.
Hired in 2007 to head city hall’s human resources department, he has worked in municipal government for three decades. His last day on the job, as one of the city’s four most powerful unelected officials, was Thursday.
“Notwithstanding this isolated event, for which Mark is bearing ultimate responsibility, he has made a number of valuable contributions to the City of Guelph,” Thomson said. “He is a dedicated public servant whose priority has always been the citizens of Guelph.”
The city thanks Amorosi “for his service and for the role he has played in positively shaping the organization over the last 10 years,” the release said.
Recruitment for a new deputy chief administrative officer of corporate services is underway, it said. In the meantime, deputy chief administrative officer of public services Colleen Clack will take over Amorosi’s duties in an interim basis while continuing to oversee public services.