Firings don’t equal accountability

The first city official to go was soon after news about the infamous 2006 spill of almost a million cubic metres of sewage into the Ottawa River – fouling Petrie Island’s swimming record that summer – finally broke in May. That also kicked off city manager Kent Kirkpatrick’s investigation into the matter, which was wrapped up in July and handed over to the city’s auditor general, Alain Lalonde.

Now, those findings have been revealed – at least preliminarily – and with them, the firings of two senior city managers and suspension and reprimand of two more staff members.

Whether those disciplinary actions can be disputed is left to the contents of the report, expected in full next month, but it stands to reason that any business or corporation dealing with a similar issue – persistent errors and a lack of accountability to the higher-ups – would have likely cut a few employees loose before the end of the day.

I interviewed David McCartney – one of the officials reportedly let go – in July about two spills that took place earlier this summer, including one that went unreported to council until more than a month after the fact. “We screwed up,” was McCartney’s explanation at the time, recounting that after requesting a volume estimate on how much sewage had overflowed, various vacations and “one thing and another” led to the oversight.

Clearly, there were a lot of “screw ups” on staff’s part that contributed to the mess the city is currently wading in – nine more spills over the past decade have recently come to light, and late last week the city plead guilty to provincial charges related to the 2006 overflow.

But the city can’t stop there. Firing staffers who didn’t do their jobs – the most tangible action they could have taken – is fine for a first step, but it’s little more than a public appeasement Band-Aid if they’re made the scapegoats of a major infrastructure concern.

This is a systemic issue, in more than one way. Obviously the combined sewer system at the heart of the problem will be a pricey fix, and one the city will eventually have to deal with – hopefully in the near future. (The money being injected into the sewage issue by all three levels of government – $33 million from the feds, $35 million from provincial infrastructure cash and $32 million from the city – is heartening, and a step in a more long-term direction.)

However, it seems the city has also been perpetuating a cycle of poor management, unaccountability and sloppy practices for at least a decade when it comes to sewage overflows, embodied in their employee ranks.

Getting rid of the weak professional links in keeping Ottawa’s waterways clean – fine. But the city must also ensure that an overall staffing and management solution is on the agenda, to make sure the buck stops with these most recent dismissals and that another generation of city employees doesn’t make the same mistakes.