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City needs more than whistleblowers

Let me begin by giving a shout-out to the city’s employees who have been true public servants. In light of recent scandals, it is obvious that there are many great staff, who pull more than their weight, and above their paygrade. Thank you.
Trudy Klassen sept 2020

Let me begin by giving a shout-out to the city’s employees who have been true public servants. In light of recent scandals, it is obvious that there are many great staff, who pull more than their weight, and above their paygrade. Thank you. I hope you can hang in until things get better. 

In response to the public concern about the latest huge project cost-overrun, the mayor released a statement on Jan. 25, saying the city would develop a whistleblower policy to ensure staff could feel confident to come forward with concerns. It’s an attempt to do the right thing.  

I love policy. However, as anyone in any organization knows, policy is not practice. Will a line, or ten, in the policy manual make a difference? Likely not.

There were staff that knew about the cost overruns. They knew, or suspected, that millions of dollars were being shoveled out the door, without accountability.

Why didn’t they feel safe to speak up? 

One reason may be that they knew their bosses in senior management have city council’s trust. Longtime city councillor Murry Krause, at one of the first council meetings after the beginning of the pandemic when staffing cuts were being considered back in April 2020, said: “We can’t let people go. The last time we balanced our budget by cutting staff, we lost good people and it took us years to recover.” 

The rest of council agreed. 

The city manager remained, and kept all her senior managers (all earning about $200,000/year,) and folks lower on the pay scale lost their jobs. From this, we can assume that city council felt that the “good people” were those in senior management.  

If you knew something was wrong, would you be willing to risk your job by speaking up about it to trusted senior management? Again, likely not.

Will a shiny new whistleblower policy change the culture? 

Taking a bird’s eye view from the public gallery, the culture at city hall took years to develop and most of the people that enabled it are still there. A simple policy change can’t change decades of culture.

Enough staff have to feel safe enough to “blow the whistle.” Then there have to be people who hear it and those that hear it need to be brave enough to act on it. Until city staff see council take the reigns of the investigation and don’t hand it over to senior management to interpret, a whistle-blowing policy is not worth the paper, or cloud space, it’s recorded on. 

City council needs to proceed with the promised investigation in a way that will reduce the fear of reprisals. Begin by sending the entire senior management team and their office assistants on a two-week break when the legal investigation team shows up. Then, begin interviews from the lowest rung and work their way up the ladder. Ask the team to submit a preliminary report to council, along with a new independent lawyer experienced in workplace whistleblowing. Then, council and their lawyer, and the investigative team, should speak to senior management assistants, then finally to senior management. This should help reduce the fear of reprisals.

Regardless of how council decides to handle this, getting to the bottom of this mess is not as simple as writing a whistle-blowing policy or hiring a team to investigate.  We will see if this council is up to the task.