A new year and some strange bedfellows have already emerged.
Last year, I was critical on several occasions of Coun. Brian Skakun's efforts to see the city's vendor expenses under $25,000 and to have a more detailed breakdown for the ones over $25,000 of exactly who the vendors were and exactly what they did.
I still stand by my argument that mayor and council are not administrators, they are policy makers. They set budgets but then must leave the actual spending to staff, with the oversight being was the money budgeted for snow removal spent on snow removal and was that money enough or too much.
That's the way a board of directors works for a corporation and that's the way a city council should operate.
But if the good councillor were to stand up in council chambers and demand the city release the cost of its legal bill to Adriana Wills for her work as the city's labour lawyer during its year-long negotiations with its unionized staff, I'd give a hearty cheer in support.
What's different about this situation is that this was the first time the City of Prince George retained legal counsel before entering into collective bargaining. What's also different is that this was the first time the city's unionized workers went on strike, albeit a one-day walkout 11 days before Christmas, followed by a cooling off period over the holidays before one day of bare-knuckle talks on Tuesday, culminating in a tentative deal.
The Citizen's city hall reporter Charelle Evelyn filed a Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FOIPPA) request in November, asking for "all records pertaining to the cost of having labour lawyer Adriana Wills participate in collective bargaining between the City of Prince George and CUPE locals 1048 and 399 including, but not limited to, invoices and contracts signed."
As our front-page story in Thursday's paper explained, the request was turned down flat. The city's legislative director Walter Babicz cited a ruling by the B.C. Supreme Court that such a disclosure is a violation of solicitor-client privilege.
The city will have to disclose what it pays to Harris & Co., the firm Wills works for in Vancouver, in its annual Statement of Financial Information this spring, if the amount is greater than $25,000. But if the city retained Harris & Co. for other legal business (and there's no way of knowing if they did or not), the dollar amount in the financial information statement wouldn't actually be what it cost the city for the service of Wills during bargaining.
Make no mistake, however, that this a political decision to withhold the cost of the legal bill.
In the same way that the now-adult victims of sexual assaults committed against them when they were children can apply to the court for the mandatory publication ban on names to be waived (this happened two years ago in the case of a former Duchess Park student who wanted the teacher who assaulted her named), the city has the authority to waive its privilege and release the legal bill.
Revealing the cost would in no way violate confidentiality regarding what services Wills provided or what advice she gave to the city's bargaining committee. It would simply address a statement then-acting city manager Kathleen Soltis made at the beginning of 2013 that Wills "is pretty efficient, so we're hoping that we will be able to do things reasonably quickly and that the costs won't add up too much."
Well, things certainly weren't done quickly, so it'd be nice to know if those costs did add up or not.
