Documents on Charlottetown CAO given to province in August 2019, says city councillor
CBC
P.E.I. Communities Minister Jamie Fox should have all the information he needs to order an investigation into financial and administrative concerns raised regarding Charlottetown's chief administrative officer, says a Charlottetown council member.
Bob Doiron says he provided more than 100 pages of documents related to CAO Peter Kelly to the province in August 2019, including a letter in which the former deputy CAO for the city, Scott Messervey, said he believes he was fired by Kelly in retaliation for having raised the concerns.
Kelly wrote a letter to Messervey saying he was being fired because of his interactions with city staff and some members of council, who felt the accountant was "looking for errors" rather than working with them to meet the city's goals.
In the letter sent to council after he was fired in January 2019, Messervey outlined 18 specific concerns with the city's financial administration and cited examples where he said he believed the city was operating in violation of P.E.I.'s Municipal Government Act. CBC has not verified those allegations.
The letter also said a complaint was being filed under the terms of the city's Fraudulent or Dishonest Conduct and Whistleblower policy.
On Tuesday, Communities Minister Jamie Fox told CBC News his office had never received the letter.
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for his department said in an email that "given the complexity of the situation, changes in senior staff, and that these claims span over the course of years, staff in the department are now reviewing all documents received concerning the City of Charlottetown."
Doiron said he provided the letter and other documents to the Office of Municipal Affairs in August 2019 in an attempt to get the department to investigate Messervey's concerns.
"I'm certainly not an accountant," Doiron said. "But I brought [the concerns] to the government, and they basically said, 'Well, you'll have to work it out yourselves...'
"Who am I supposed to go to? I can't go to the mayor. I can't go to the CAO."
Among the concerns Doiron said he raised with provincial officials, all taken from Messervey's January 2019 letter to council, were allegations that:
"If you find nothing wrong and everything's running well, then my concerns have been answered," Doiron said.
"But they didn't do that, and the concerns are still there to this day."
He said provincial officials told him they needed time to go over the documents. Then he met with three officials in November 2019. Fox was not among them.