Halton’s Catholic school board trustees paid more than $24,000 during the last school year to have a parliamentarian sit in on their argumentative meetings and adjudicate procedural disputes.
The board released the record of payments it made to professional parliamentarian Atul Kapur after Oakville News requested the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Kapur was initially hired in Sept. 2020 after trustees asked school board director Pat Daly to find a parliamentarian to offer the board training and guidance.
He attended the virtual meetings throughout the school year, eventually racking up $24,093.75 in bills.
'Dysfunctional meetings' led to call for an investigation
Kapur was typically called upon multiple times each meeting to interpret bylaws or offer an opinion on a ruling made by board chair and Milton trustee Patrick Murphy. But despite that, the school board’s inability to function effectively was on clear display throughout the year.
Unfinished agendas, arguments and interruptions, and eventually the ejection of trustees from meetings led Murphy to introduce a stunning motion at the board’s June 29 meeting.
“The meetings are dysfunctional, we’re not meeting our mandate in my opinion, and we’re not moving the business of the board forward,” said Murphy, who sought to have a third-party investigator examine trustee behaviour and decorum during meetings as well as determine if he had acted with bias as chair.
Murphy’s motion was eventually approved by a vote of 5-4, with Oakville trustee Nancy Guzzo voting in favour and Oakville trustees Helena Karabela and Peter DeRosa voting against.
At their Sept. 7 meeting, trustees will receive the 38-page investigative report, completed by Barry Bresner of ADR Chambers, a Toronto-based mediation and arbitration services.
Bresner’s report notes that the 5-4 split is seen frequently, as the nine-member board has “evolved into two factions, which frequently vote as a bloc regardless of the issues on the table.”
Oakville trustees are split between the two sides. Guzzo typically votes with the majority faction of Brenda Agnew, Marvin Duarte, Janet O’Hearn-Czarnota and Murphy, while Karabela and DeRosa vote with Burlington trustees Tim O’Brien and Vincent Iantomassi.
Oakville trustee DeRosa's comments "disrespectful and insulting"
After reviewing over 50 hours of board meeting recordings, Bresner absolves Murphy of bias, finding he “stayed calm and respectful in emotionally charged debates” and was “fair and balanced, in the circumstances.”
Although noting that he was not investigating any specific trustee or incident, he does chide trustees for “dilatory conduct” – or specifically acting to create delay.
“It would be a virtually endless task to identify every instance in the 21 meetings in which debate has been repetitive, doomed motions and motions to amend have been brought and debated, debates over agendas have taken up valuable meeting time, and procedural rulings have been sought and appealed, none of which advance the business of the Board in any meaningful way,” noted Bresner.
He did find reasonable grounds for concluding that the minority faction of trustees – including Karabela and DeRosa – engaged in dilatory conduct during meetings that debated flying the Gay Pride flag and considered the motion for an investigation.
“Moving a series of motions or points of order that are doomed to fail and repeatedly appealing procedural rulings of the chair are hallmarks of dilatory conduct,” says the report.
“When a trustee disagrees with a motion being debated, he or she has the opportunity to voice his or her opinion on that motion. Where it is clear that there is sufficient support for a motion to be passed, a trustee acts in bad faith and in violation of his or her obligations in moving amendments or moving to table or postpone the main motion indefinitely when it is plain and obvious that those motions will fail for lack of requisite support and are only raised to delay the inevitable.”
Bresner saved his toughest criticism for Oakville trustee DeRosa, who made comments questioning the competency of board staff and the commitment of trustees to financial oversight during the June 24 board meeting.
DeRosa’s “bald accusations” were not only “disrespectful and insulting,” Bresner noted that he was unable to find any support for the allegations that financial reports provided to the board were incomplete or untimely.
“While a trustee can perhaps be excused for a spontaneous outburst in an emotional moment, the fact that trustee DeRosa apparently read from a prepared statement is an aggravating factor,” added Bresner.
He also criticizes DeRosa’s habit of regularly voting against minutes of prior meetings without having voiced any concern with those minutes.
“The approval of minutes is generally a consent exercise at most boards, absent an error which is identified and corrected,” says the report. “Opposing something as innocuous as the minutes without any explanation is not productive and only furthers the factionalism at the board.”
Contacted for comment, DeRosa said, "I want to see what ensues from the board meeting on Tuesday, and then I will react accordingly, but I will tell you that I am all about governance, accountability, transparency and taking care of taxpayers money and that's what the (Education) Act and my role as an elected official holds me to account to.”
Relationship-building retreat among recommendations
Among the recommended actions for creating a more functional board, the report suggests that trustees:
- hire legal counsel to review/streamline procedural bylaws to make them more efficient
- consider holding a relationship-building retreat with a professional facilitator to encourage trustees to work cooperatively
- avoid rehashing arguments from the board’s policy committee when there is no new information that would lead to trustees changing their votes
“There is no magic bullet which will remedy the divide between the majority and minority at the board,” the report adds, encouraging trustees to put aside philosophical differences for the greater good and accept the report as constructive criticism.
Chair Murphy declined to speak about the report until after trustees receive it at their meeting on Tuesday night. The board did not respond to our request to interview Daly.