Chaos at council: Harrison Hot Springs politicians beg for help

The only thing Harrison Hot Springs’ council seems able to agree upon is the fact that the village is in big trouble.

The last two months have seen allegations of secret meetings, declarations of non-confidence, and—in the midst of it all—a massive pay hike for those involved. Amid all that, top staff have quit, leaving the municipality’s bureaucracy unable to properly function and potentially putting residents at risk.

But council did recently agree on one thing. They unanimously voted to write a letter begging for help from BC’s Inspector of Municipalities, an antiquated office that rarely steps into local government disputes.

The election

Harrison Hot Springs has long had a council that did things its own way, to put it generously. In a village where many residents are retired and quite passionate about local affairs, political conflict and sparring was not exactly rare. But the recent turmoil has brought things to a new level.

(Most details in this article come from stories written in the Agassiz-Harrison Observer. Click the links to read each one.)

Much can be traced directly to last October’s election. The long-time mayor, Leo Facio, had decided to not seek re-election—at least for the top job. Instead, he ran for a seat on council, paving the way for incumbent Coun. Samantha Piper to seek the mayor’s seat.

With a mayor only having a little more power than a councillor, the stage seemed to be set for a modest transition.

Voters, though, didn’t want Piper to lead them. Instead, they chose newcomer Ed Wood, a former City of Vancouver business planning manager who had criticized how the village was being run. Wood garnered 44% of the vote; Piper 34% and former mayor John Allen— another Facio critic—22%, meaning nearly two-thirds of voters cast a ballot for a candidate who had criticized the previous administration.

Wood saw his election as a mandate. But his blunt language immediately roiled the waters because voters had also elected Facio and three others who would end up allying with him. (Only five people ran for four council spots.)

On the evening he and his fellow councillors were sworn in, Wood made a speech in which he said he had heard from residents who were concerned about “poorly-designed development, negative interaction with senior village office administration, and a lack of community engagement.”

The Agassiz-Harrison Observer reported that Piper and another former councillor in the audience left before Wood finished speaking. The next morning, Facio told the paper that Wood should apologize to outgoing councillors.

It has been all downhill from there.

Staff departures

By the end of January, Harrison Hot Springs had lost three senior managers, including two-thirds of its administration.

The reasons for their departures aren’t yet public, but in mid-February, the village announced in a statement posted on its website that chief administrative officer Madeline McDonald had retired. The statement came more than two weeks after McDonald’s retirement date.

At the same time, the Observer reported that deputy CAO Debra Key and community service manager Rhona Schell were on leave.

The village is a tiny municipality, and its website lists just three administration employees. Two are McDonald and Key (a month after the departures, the site has yet to be updated). The other is the village’s clerk.

Illegal meeting allegations

Wood has continually fought his four councillors about how meetings are conducted and held.

In BC, a mayor has a single vote and a majority of council needs to agree on any significant decisions. The mayor’s power generally comes both from the ability to speak as the voice of a community, and the fact that they chair and oversee council meetings.

That can create conflict when a community elects a majority of councillors who are politically or temperamentally opposed to the mayor they have chosen. (Harrison is arguably more dysfunctional than the previous Chilliwack School Board which, despite all the bickering, had a chair who usually had a majority of colleagues siding with her.)

Wood has alleged that his four council colleagues have met without his permission, which he says breaches rules for how such meetings should be held. Wood has regularly balked at the holding of closed-door meetings. (Municipalities frequently conduct sensitive business in meetings not open to the public. Such meetings can be used to discuss issues that cannot be aired in public because of privacy, legal, or financial implications. Frequently, these are described as matters pertaining to the three Ls: land, legal, and labour. But with little oversight, it can be impossible for outsiders to know when a council is limiting closed-door discussions to necessary private topics and when a council is using closed-door meetings to have discussions that it prefers to keep from the public eye.)

Wood said three councillors met in private in mid-January without him and Coun. John Buckley. At a February council meeting he said such a meeting would have been illegal, emphasizing the importance of transparency and accountability.

The Observer noted that the purported secret meeting came months after Wood had denied a request for a closed-doors council meeting to discuss administrative concerns.

The raise

As the ability of council and the municipality were losing the ability to function, the politicians seemingly voted to give themselves a raise.

Mayor and council had already received a 7% cost-of-living increase at the start of the year as the result of a policy adopted last term. The mayor’s salary was set at around $32,000 with councillors making around half that. But the minutes of a committee of the whole meeting show that in January, the four councillors voted to hand themselves (and the mayor) a massive 30% pay increase. They also gave themselves a $1,000 yearly stipend for computers used in their work. (For councillors, that amounts to another 6% bump.)

The vote followed a report by staff that compared the pay of village politicians to those in five other similarly sized communities (Anmore, Pemberton, Chase, Fruitvale, and Ashcroft). Of those communities, Harrison’s politicians were already the second-highest paid (before only Anmore, a small and wealthy community just north of Coquitlam).

The CBC also recently compared politician pay prior to the Harrison salary hike. It suggested that Harrison’s councilor s were already among the best-paid in their population class. (Anmore, again, was the one outlier.)

Although council originally gave the pay hike a thumbs up at a January committee of the whole meeting, Wood brought the matter back to council for a public vote in February. After some resistance from his colleagues, that vote was held, with Wood opposed and the four councillors (seemingly reluctantly) endorsing the raise again.

Ejection rejection

That Feb. 21 council meeting confirmed the utter dysfunction that has seized Harrison’s municipal government.

The meeting began with a remarkable standoff in which Wood sought to eject Facio and Coun. Michie Vidal from the meeting after the pair had interrupted him as he began to talk about an “important letter” sent to the village.

“If you choose not to leave, I can make that happen,” Wood said.

But it turned out that Wood, despite asking for help from those in the room, could not make that happen.

Facio never did leave, and an awkward silence ensued, with Wood periodically asking Facio to leave.

Eventually, after Wood threatened to call the authorities to eject Facio, he gave his predecessor the chance to apologize to remain in the room. Facio grudgingly did so “for the sake of the meeting.”

(Wood then discussed the letter that sparked the confrontation. He said it attacked himself and two staff members.)

A lack of confidence

Minutes later, Wood moved on to another letter. One in which his four councillors had notified him that they desired to hold a “vote of non-confidence for the mayor.” Wood said the councillors requested a hearing, and that he would grant such a request, but only in a public forum.

“If council wants to make a concern to the mayor, do so in public,” he said. There has not yet been a non-confidence vote held in public.

The Current asked both Wood and Vidal for the notice of the proposed non-confidence vote. Both declined, with Vidal writing that the matter was “internal.” The village said it did not have a record of the notice.

A non-confidence vote would only be a symbolic act. Unlike a Prime Minister or Premier, a mayor gains their power directly from the ballot box, not indirectly through the allegiances of a majority of elected representatives.

Help us!

The next two hours of that Feb. 21 meeting saw continual clashes between Wood and his council.

Finally, near the meeting’s end, Vidal asked to have a letter forwarded to the Inspectors of Municipalities begging for help.

Vidal declared that the absence of key staff has “resulted in the inability of elected council members to provide good governance to the Village of Harrison Hot Springs.”

She continued: “These events have jeopardized the stability, integrity, and the financial security of our community.”

The letter sent to the Inspectors of Municipalities requests assistance “in the form of guidance and direction to address our urgent concerns.”

Wood said nothing to disagree with Vidal’s statement. He only suggested several “friendly amendments” to refer to relevant municipal laws. Harrison’s council could, seemingly, agree on one thing: the present situation is not working.

What comes next

Whether the inspector can or will help is unclear. It seems unlikely at the moment.

The Office of the Inspector of Municipalities was created to help BC’s towns at a time when many were being poorly run and facing bankruptcy. But BC’s cities and towns are more professionally run now, and the office seems mostly a relic of another time. The name of the current inspector is not even available online, and there is no reporting about its activities.

The inspector is technically Tara Faganello, the assistant deputy minister for the local government division of BC’s ministry of municipal affairs. (The Current had to call the office to learn this.) But Faganello’s chief job is to be assistant deputy minister, not inspect municipalities. Her role as Inspector of Municipalities is mostly a relic of a bygone era.

The website of the office says it has a “significant role in the overarching framework of local government accountability.” But on the same webpage, the office suggests that it doesn’t really do much these days. In a section entitled “resolving local government-related concerns,” the website lists six options for a member of the public to raise issues of concern about their local government. None involve actually appealing to the Inspector of Municipalities.

The inspector can still hold inquiries into how municipalities conduct their business, but that authority is rarely used, the office’s website notes.

“As an inquiry would be a significant adjudicative exercise, the matter would need to be one that affects the fundamental viability of a local government or have serious consequences for the local government system.”

Harrison’s council has suggested that the viability of its local government may, indeed, be at risk. But it remains to be seen whether those problems can be fixed by appealing an inspector who rarely inspects anything.

*Correction: This story originally said the January meeting at which the vote to increase salaries was unrecorded. There was a recording (it’s linked in the story above).