Latest news with #municipalGovernance
CBC
04-07-2025
- Politics
- CBC
N.B. codes of conduct allow for degree of council secrecy not possible under N.S. rules
Under New Brunswick rules, the public can be kept in the dark when their local officials face discipline — an approach far less open than one adopted next door in Nova Scotia. In Strait Shores, in eastern New Brunswick, a councillor was temporarily suspended after an investigation that was kept from the public and was later found to have violated due process. In the northern municipality of Heron Bay, which includes Dalhousie and Charlo, council suspended Mayor Normand Pelletier and, as Radio-Canada reported, has refused to publicly say why. And in Sunbury-York South, the municipality has not publicly shared details of why Mayor David Hayward was suspended at a recent meeting. Questions about due process have also arisen in Grand Lake, where a councillor was suspended in April following an investigation that never let her respond to the allegations she faced. But if those four municipalities had been in Nova Scotia, recent legislation would have required details to be made public, following a clearly outlined due process for everyone involved in the investigations. N.B. code has ambiguity, expert says Last October, Nova Scotia adopted a new code of conduct for municipal elected officials, which acts as a blanket policy for all 49 municipalities in the province. That's different from New Brunswick, where the Local Governance Act gives municipalities some guidelines that must be in their code of conduct but leaves it up to each council to create and implement their own version. "The Nova Scotia code is clearer and avoids ambiguity like the one we have in New Brunswick," said André Daigle, a municipal law lawyer in Dieppe who's been working with municipalities and local planning commissions for more than 30 years. Daigle said municipalities are left "in a vulnerable state because of the void that they have to fill themselves with the code of conduct." Because of this, there are minor variations among the codes of New Brunswick councils. The Nova Scotia code clocks in at 3,971 words, New Brunswick's has 898 words. Nova Scotia also mandates regular training on the new code for all elected officials, which is something the New Brunswick Union of Municipalities had called for. For procedural fairness, the Nova Scotia code requires that a council member who is the subject of the complaint be given an opportunity to review and respond to information in an investigator's report. Details about who the investigator is and their contact must also be public. And when imposing a sanction on a councillor, council must consider whether the member's contravention was intentional, a first-time offence, and whether the member has taken any steps to remedy the issue. "And if they turn their mind to those factors, the hope, from what I can see, is that the sanctions will flow better," Daigle said. "And they'll be more measured if you take those things under consideration." N.S. code includes clear outlines for transparency Transparency is also a key focus of the Nova Scotia code. Once a council has acted on a complaint, it must publicly share what specific rule was broken, the investigator's recommendations and what sanctions were imposed. In New Brunswick, a council must only make a report available to the complainant and the affected member of council. The council must review the report at a meeting and vote on a next step, but the meeting is allowed to be closed to the public if council deems the matter confidential. "We're not really sure how to handle those investigations and at what point it becomes public and what details come out in public," Daigle said. By comparison, he described the Nova Scotia regulation as having "a fantastic framework." He said the New Brunswick code should speak more to the process of a code of conduct investigation. Currently, the code says that there must be "a fair and impartial process for investigation." "What is a fair and impartial process for an investigation? Don't leave municipalities guessing how to draft these. We have 72 municipalities, you're going to have 72 versions of the bylaw." CBC News requested an interview with the Department of Local Government but one was not provided. When asked why New Brunswick doesn't have requirements similar to Nova Scotia's, a spokesperson did not answer the question and instead said it is up to the discretion of each province and territory to establish regulations "as they best see fit." Local Government Minister Aaron Kennedy told CBC News in April that it's best for councils to handle their disciplinary process with little interference from Fredericton. 'We need to be held to a certain standard,' N.S. official says Yarmouth Mayor Pam Mood, the president of the Nova Scotia Federation of Municipalities, said the association spent two years helping draft the new legislation. She said it was important the code of conduct be the same across the province because it was confusing to have something be outlawed in one municipality but allowed in a neighbouring municipality. "We're here to serve the public," Mood said. "And so sometimes we need help, not because everybody's dishonest, but because we need to know what the rules are and where we can go." Before the new policy was enacted, Mood said, she would hear about councils having code of conduct violations "all the time." "You have people screaming at each other … at a table where they were elected together to be a team, treating each other like they're the enemy," she said. "It's childish and there's no need for it. You know, that type of behaviour is not power. It's exactly the opposite." As for the transparency provisions of the new code, Mood said the public deserves to know what their elected officials are doing. "Tell us if somebody's misbehaving, did I elect that person?" she said.
Mail & Guardian
28-05-2025
- Business
- Mail & Guardian
Auditor-general exposes municipal meltdown
Auditor general Tsakani Maluleke This is despite an uptick in the number of clean audit reports for the 2023-24 financial year. Maluleke painted a dire picture of the widespread poor quality of financial reporting and mismanagement in a briefing to parliament's cooperative governance portfolio committee on local government audit outcomes for the financial year. 'The good news is that we are back to 41 clean audits [out of 275 municipalities], which is where we started back in 2021. So we're no more at the 34 that I talked about last year. However, that makes up 15% of the municipalities across the country,' she said. 'It's great that we are reversing this trend around disclaimers of audit opinion. However, the state of financial and performance management disciplines in local government still leaves much to be desired, and so the story, in many ways, is similar to what I would have shared before. I worry … that I will sound like a stuck record.' Her office's assessment underscored a profound crisis in municipal governance that extends far beyond mere administrative inefficiency. She said 14 municipalities received Ninety-nine municipalities had unqualified opinions and 41 municipalities achieved clean audits. Maluleke said the metropolitan landscape was particularly alarming. 'The eight metros across the country look after half of the expenditure budget for local government. They look after service delivery that affects 46% of households across the country. Their budgets are quite significant,' she said. 'They sit in the centres of economic activity, and so, given the scale of their operations, the complexity thereof, but also the resources that they manage and even their location, they should have no difficulty attracting the skills that they need to run their environment. 'Unfortunately, out of the eight, we've got only one clean audit, which is the City of Cape Town. It was the only clean audit last year as well.' Maluleke's office was also concerned about the quality of financial statements of the big metros and municipalities, noting that when the audit started only 63 out of 275 municipalities provided quality financial statements. 'By the time we finished, we managed to get 140 credible financial statements through corrections during the audit process,' she said. 'The City of Joburg didn't give us quality financial statements when we began our audit. Now that's a big city, the biggest in the country, the biggest on the continent. There should be no difficulty in ensuring that you've got the skills and the capability to do what you're supposed to do, just on compiling financial statements.' The audit exposed shocking institutional decay across infrastructure projects. 'We selected projects mostly in the metros and in those that have disclaimers of audit opinion. We found that the majority of projects had problems — 77% of the projects we visited had problems. Either they were delayed, there was poor quality work and then we also identified matters around the inadequate maintenance of infrastructure,' she said. 'The reason this exists, in our view, is that even if performance agreements are done as a tick-box exercise, they are not monitored. Contractors are appointed poorly through a procurement process that is not in compliance with the law and one that does not lead to the best decision. So the contractor that's appointed is one that's not equal to the task, then they are not managed — contract management capability is not there. 'The municipality doesn't have employees within it that have a set of standard operating procedures, a set of disciplines and even a set of skills to monitor the performance of these contractors, and we're seeing even once they've seen problems with the performance of the contractor, they don't hold them accountable. 'Other than the municipalities that have got clean audits, you've got the majority of municipalities with material compliance findings, mostly in the area of procurement and contract management. In a nutshell, it tells us that we do not yet have a culture, a state of control, procedures and even accounting mechanisms. 'Metros are not any better. And given their significant budgets, one would have thought that this area of procurement would enjoy tremendous attention by the people that hold the purse.' Buffalo City's engineering crisis epitomised municipal dysfunction, the auditor general said, telling MPs: 'They have had a vacancy for district engineer responsible for electricity for 80 months — that's six years and eight months.' An identical vacancy for sanitation engineering had remained unfilled for 24 months. Maluleke said the financial mismanagement is systemic and deeply entrenched. 'This year 219 municipalities spent together R1.47 billion on consultants purely for the purpose of helping them compile financial statements. Last year we reported R1.37 billion so the number is not really changing. 'This is when there are CFOs [chief financial officers] in place and there are finance functions that are populated with people that have been appointed. We also note that municipalities that get disclaimers of opinion also still spend on consultants on average R6 million. 'Municipalities with adverse findings also spend on consultants. The ones with qualified audits also spend on consultants. It tells us then that the key question is: why is it that even when there's consultants being appointed, we still get bad quality submissions?' She said her office had been asking this question for the past 10 years. 'The answer is that in most instances, the work of the consultant is not being reviewed. They say, well, there's 2% [of cases] where the consultants didn't deliver. But much of the problem is either consultants are appointed late, the underlying documents are not available or that their work is not being managed properly by the people that appointed them,' she said. 'What it tells you is that you've got CFOs and finance staff in place. They appoint consultants every year, and then once the consultant is there, they basically leave their desks. And so the consultant must engage with the auditors, which, in our view, tells a story about the culture and discipline more than even skills.' 'There is an element where the people under the CFO, there are some who are appointed and don't have the skill to do the basics. However, much of the problem, we believe in local government, especially in this area of overusing consultants, relates to discipline.' Municipal debt continues to spiral out of control as many municipalities approve unfunded budgets. 'We see unauthorised expenditure, meaning that where you've got expenditure levels approved, people are spending beyond that … And of course, that then compromises the financial health of those municipalities. Many ended up with a deficit situation, and many have got major creditors that they don't pay, such as She said suppliers and creditors to municipalities were waiting 286 days on average to receive money due to them, because cash flow had become very tight across many municipalities. Many of the suppliers then charged interest and penalties, much of which ended up as fruitless and wasteful expenditure. The treasury's Eskom debt relief programme aimed at helping municipalities enter into a settlement arrangement with the power utility had failed. 'It's not working — 84% of the municipalities that participate in that programme are not complying with the conditions that they subscribed to. Again, in many instances, that's a discipline issue,' Maluleke told members of parliament. The auditor general's report noted that cooperative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) MECs, the minister and provincial legislatures were not doing their jobs in overseeing municipalities. 'The Municipal Systems Act provides that the MEC of Cogta must compile a report that analyses the performance of each municipality and that report must include remedial action that the MEC or municipality is undertaking and provide a report to provincial legislature every year on how municipality is responding,' Maluleke said. 'We have found those reports are either not done or if they are done they are done late; they are also either not tabled in the legislature and if tabled they are not dealt with in the legislature. 'We believe wholeheartedly that if MEC did their part they would not be lurching from crisis to crisis and if the legislature played their part they wouldn't be waiting for the AG to say there is a disclaimer here, they would be monitoring these movements as a matter of course.' She said the minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs's compilation report was often not done or done late. 'We have to get every single player in the ecosystem of accountability doing their part otherwise we will not arrest the decline of local government,' Maluleke said.
