The backroom scheme to hire Carmen D'Angelo as Niagara Region's top bureaucrat began amid chaos at regional council, long before anyone knew it was happening.

In late 2015, then regional CAO Harry Schlange was at constant odds with then-regional chair Alan Caslin, according to the Ombudsman's report released Friday.

The chair, in a bid to rid himself of the problem, sought regional council's authority to fire Schlange. The CAO's fate would be decided on Jan. 14, 2016 at a closed-door meeting of council.

D'Angelo, then the CAO of the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority, even called Schlange to encourage him to "keep his chin up." At the same time, however, D'Angelo was counting on Schlange's demise. On Dec. 13, 2015, D'Angelo crafted a map to his accession to the post of regional CAO.

It was on a spreadsheet titled "CAO Critical Path," and laid out in specific detail how he would get the lucrative job.

It included, a month beforehand, the date of the meeting that would end Schlange's tenure, details of the selection committee, the hiring of an executive search firm and how many interviews for the CAO job there would be.

According to the map, uncovered by Ontario's Ombudsman during a more than year-long investigation, D'Angelo would assume his post as Niagara Region's chief administrative officer on May 6, 2016.

According to the Ombudsman's report, titled "Inside Job," D'Angelo "often received confidential information from regional councillors, especially those who were also members of the conservation authority's board of directors."

(Those councillors were former Grimsby councillor Tony Quirk, former Fort Erie councillor Sandy Annunizata, Niagara Falls Mayor Jim Diodati, Welland Mayor Frank Campion, former Wainfleet mayor April Jeffs, former Pelham councillor Brian Baty, former West Lincoln mayor Doug Joyner, former Port Colborne mayor John Maloney, former Lincoln councillor Bill Hodgson, former St. Catharines councillor Bruce Timms, and former Niagara-on-the-Lake mayor Partrick Darte. The Ombudsman report does not indicate which members may have tipped off D'Angelo to Caslin's plan to fire Schlange.)

The plan failed. Caslin lost his bid to fire Schlange by a mere four votes. But it wasn't a final defeat, just a delay.

D'Angelo finally got the job in October 2016 after Schlange resigned and moved to Brampton city hall.

The 2015 plot, along with the scheme that eventually landed D'Angelo the $250,000 a year post, was laid out in detail in Ombudsman Paul Dube's report released Friday after 457 days of investigative work.

"I found that the regional municipality's actions with respect to the CAO hiring process were unreasonable, unjust, and wrong," Dube wrote of the series of insider leaks from Caslin's office to D'Angelo before and during the hiring process.

"Mr. D'Angelo was provided with substantive content to be used in his application materials by insiders who had access to information not available to the general public or to other candidates.

"The lack of fairness and transparency in the hiring process created controversy and distrust within the region and served to undermine public confidence in local government."

Dube made 16 recommendations in his report to "avert similar situations in the future." During a Nov. 14 closed-door meeting, regional council unanimously accepted all 16 recommendations.

Regional Chair Jim Bradley has called a special meeting for Thursday to discuss the report publicly.

Dube launched his probe in August 2018 after regional council asked him to investigate. The request came after more than a year of investigation by The Standard that found D'Angelo, before and during the hiring process, had downloaded at least seven documents a candidate for CAO should not have.

Those documents included drafts of confidential chair's reports on the CAO post; interview questions and answers; answers for a written submission to the hiring committee; and confidential information about other candidates.

Most of those documents were created by Caslin's policy director Robert D'Amboise and his communications director, Jason Tamming.

The Standard also uncovered D'Angelo's secret contract extension in 2017, awarded to him by Caslin without the knowledge of regional council.

That deal extended D'Angelo's contract for three years, granted him a golden parachute of a year's pay if his contract was not renewed and three years pay even if he was fired with cause.

Dube found the contract extension "unreasonable" and outside the bounds of best practices.

However, given that D'Angelo is suing the Region in a constructive dismissal suit, Dube declined to "make any findings concerning the validity of the contract, but limited my consideration to best contract practices."

The Ombudsman said he received 171 complaints about D'Angelo's hiring and contract after The Standard began publishing stories about the issue.

In interviews with the Ombudsman's investigators, conducted under oath, D'Angelo at first claimed he could not recall if he received the documents and claimed "someone could have fabricated documents and placed them" on his electronic devices.

"Other witnesses suggested that any files found on the conservation authority's servers could have been 'planted' there (or) those files could have been altered to change the file's author, or the date and time of the file's creation."

D'Angelo claimed — as he had during a closed-door meeting with regional council in July 2018 — that he was a victim of a "proxy war" between councillors.

Caslin, in interviews with the Ombudsman, spun his own conspiracy theory, claiming that "'special interest groups' were manufacturing 'out-and-out lies' in order to discredit the CAO" — a rationale used to justify the secret contract extension.

But the Ombudsman hired a forensic investigator to analyze the documents D'Angelo received and downloaded onto his laptop while working at the NPCA in 2015 and 2016.

Copies of those files were kept on the NPCA's servers and were obtained by The Standard and by the Ombudsman's team.

According to the report, the odds of the digital evidence being faked were 1 in 3.4 x 10 to the 38th power. (That is 34 followed by 38 zeros.)

"After a thorough examination of the files obtained by my Office in this investigation, the forensics report concluded that the likelihood that files were planted is very low. The experts found no evidence of any hacking, or that any files were tampered with or planted, and concluded with reasonable confidence that no tampering occurred," the report says.

Pressed by the Ombudsman, D'Angelo said his likely source of the documents was D'Amboise. Tamming and D'Angelo admitted the communications director assisted him during the hiring process.

As the 2016 hiring process got underway, rumours that D'Angelo had been "pre-selected" for the job began to circulate through the region. The report, echoing previous reporting by The Standard, pointed to one senior staff member who was considering applying for the CAO job who was asked not to apply to clear the road for D'Angelo.

"He said he had considered applying for the CAO position himself, until August 25, when he attended a meeting with a member of council and Mr. D'Angelo, at which the councillor suggested that his application for the job would 'complicate things' for Mr. D'Angelo," says the report of the employee previously identified by The Standard as former regional director of procurement Jason Burgess.

"The employee recalled Mr. D'Angelo sketching out an organizational chart for the region that included a new 'Deputy CAO' position; he interpreted the message as an inducement for him to drop his application for CAO, in exchange for a chance to become Deputy CAO."

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The Ombudsman's report says the efforts to eliminate opposition to D'Angelo's hire included a shadow communications strategy within the region to build up his reputation.

After Schlange resigned, a senior staff member was approached by a councillor "to arrange a meeting to discuss Mr. D'Angelo as a 'successor.' The employee told us it was clear to him that Mr. D'Angelo was the councillor's choice for the position; he said the councillor assured him that he could 'get the votes' to complete the hire," the report says.

The councillor told the Ombudsman he does not recall the meeting, but investigators found an email trail confirming the councillor's effort to get the employee to speak positively to his colleagues about D'Angelo.

"We obtained an email from the councillor to the employee dated April 15, 2016, in which the councillor thanks the employee for the meeting, and suggests that the employee mention Mr. D'Angelo's name to other staff as a good candidate for CAO. The email states that this messaging early on 'may provide some ease as we move forward and regional staff start hearing all kinds of rumours.'"

Neither the councillor or employee are named in the report.

Those rumours eventually reached the ears of the Phelps Group, whose staff brought their concerns to Caslin, who exploded angrily at the notion the fix was in.

"[The Phelps Group] told us that the firm was concerned enough to raise this allegation with the Chair during a phone call. They described the Chair as 'aggressive, defensive' and 'initially extremely hostile to the suggestion.' The firm's staff noted that by the end of the phone call, the Chair committed to a fair and open process," the report says. "The Chair told us he did not recall this discussion or the allegation."

The Ombudsman's report also detailed how D'Amboise worked to remove concerns how D'Angelo was hired by the NPCA from documents provided by the Phelps Group — the search firm hired to run the hiring process — before the final recommendation was presented to regional council.

One of D'Angelo's references described his NPCA hiring as having involved a degree of "hanky-panky," but the comment was removed from the final recommendation at D'Amboise's insistence.

"Staff at the search firm told us that the Chair's office wanted the comment removed from the report because they considered it to be 'hearsay,' and the result of previous negative media coverage," the report says.

The Ombudsman's report does not explain why so much effort was expended to clear a path for D'Angelo. In an interview, Dube said investigations do not always reveal motives and Caslin will have to speak about what he knew and when he knew it.

To date, Caslin has declined to speak publicly about D'Angelo's hiring and did not respond to an interview request for this story.

D'Angelo did not respond to an interview request for this story, but he did provide a response to the Ombudsman's draft report to the watchdog.

In his response, D'Angelo argued that Dube could not use the data once stored in his NPCA laptop, saying he has a "reasonable expectation of privacy in the computer he used while employed with the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority." The Ombudsman said that exception is not reasonable and the Ombudsman Act does not prevent his office from obtaining personal information in the course of an investigation.

D'Angelo also claimed the Ombudsman cannot conclude that he had been given an unfair advantage during the CAO hiring process because "it has not been established that he would have been unsuccessful without the information (leaked to him.)"

"The disclosure of confidential information to only one candidate in a competition is intrinsically unfair," Dube wrote. "There is no method of quantifying the extent to which Mr. D'Angelo benefited from improper disclosure of insider knowledge. However, this does not mean he wasn't given an unfair advantage. It is the very definition of one."

The former CAO also argued that "while the process is perceived to have been unfair, the outcome caused no demonstrable harm to the Region."

The Ombudsman said the inside job had caused "significant controversy and reputation damage," to the region, which has had to spend "considerable funds" responding to public concern about D'Angelo's hiring.

Ontario Ombudsman Report on Niagara Region CAO hiring by Grant LaFleche on Scribd





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