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The city wrongly fired a whistle-blowing engineer and owes him more than two years of back pay, a labour arbitrator says.
City water engineer Ted Cooper is best known for being proved right in 2008 about a grave mistake in city calculations that could have led to flooding in new developments in Kanata, despite his managers’ efforts to keep him away from the project.
In 2013, for persisting with warnings that even a revised plan for the area near the Carp River is dangerously flawed, they terminated him.
More than a decade ago, Cooper wasn’t the only city engineer worried about a mistaken model for the way water would flow through a huge new development in west Kanata, but he was the most vocal. By his assessment, the city was underestimating the level of the Carp River in severe rainstorms by as much as a metre — an amount of water that could swamp highway bridges and flood 1,000 houses.
In 2005, he lost an attempt to fight discipline for “badgering” his co-workers about the error. But in 2008, the city finally agreed that he was right. It froze planning approvals while other engineers fixed the mistake. The city auditor-general investigated. Then-mayor Larry O’Brien praised Cooper in public for his doggedness.
“His future is safe in this city,” O’Brien said at the time.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Still officially off the file at work, Cooper studied the new water model and concluded even it had been “fudged.” He filed access-to-information requests and brought challenges to the provincial environment ministry.
Finally, in spring 2013, he sent emails to his own manager and then that manager’s boss laying out in detail his concerns about plans to dredge the Carp River and change its banks so it would carry water away faster. In bad storms the water level would still be much too high, Cooper wrote. Parks along the river would wash away. The city’s planning stormwater ponds that would be lower than the bed of the river they’re supposed to drain into. Did the people working on the plans realize that?
“In the email, the grievor (Cooper) expresses his concerns about calculations and the infrastructure issues as he sees them,” wrote arbitrator Deborah Leighton in her ruling. “He also requests specific information within a short time frame and asks if City Council has been informed or ‘whether I should be requesting another investigation to be undertaken by the Auditor General’.”
That got him fired for insubordination.
“After an investigation, the employer concluded that the grievor was acting in violation of the City’s Code of Conduct and was not being respectful to the City or City employees,” Leighton wrote. “The employer took the position that the grievor had been told not to discuss these matters with staff and that he ignored the employer’s directions not to intervene in the Project.”
The trouble is that Cooper’s discipline record was officially clean. To fire him, his boss’s boss – the city’s manager of planning policy Lee Ann Snedden –used old warnings he’d been given to stop bugging people with his fretting about floods. But he’d had nothing added to his file in two years. Under his labour contract, the old letters should have been wiped.
Instead, the human-resources department handed Snedden discipline records from 2005 and 2011, none of which she was supposed to have. (The one from 2005 was when he was pulled off the Kanata West project, after which his persistence probably saved a whole lot of flood damage.)
“Ms. Snedden concluded that he was not a team player, but there was no evidence to support this or that he was not working well on his assigned projects within the City,” Leighton found.
Snedden was doing her best but she’d never fired anyone before and didn’t know the rules, Leighton wrote. Based on her faulty understanding, Snedden recommended that Cooper be turfed and got approval all up the chain, including from city manager Kent Kirkpatrick.
Obviously someone should have known better.
Cooper’s email “was unprofessional and showed bad judgement” wrote Leighton, but ruled that a fair punishment would have been a five-day suspension, not dismissal. That means Cooper gets his job back, plus pay dating back to when he was wrongly fired in May 2013.
The city wanted to pay him off instead of bring him back to work, saying trust in him is irretrievably broken. Nope, Leighton ruled. There’s zero proof of that, particularly since neither his immediate boss nor his co-workers seem to have had any problem with him. They even used to go to him for advice before he was kicked out the door.
“There is some evidence that some senior managers do not trust the grievor not to continue raising issues about the (Carp River),” Leighton wrote, but that’s it. Give him his job. If anybody has problems with the details, bring them to me and I’ll sort them out for you, she wrote.
And now, of course, since it’s been well over two years since he sent that email, Cooper’s record is clean again.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
City water engineer Ted Cooper is best known for being proved right in 2008 about a grave mistake in city calculations that could have led to flooding in new developments in Kanata, despite his managers’ efforts to keep him away from the project.
In 2013, for persisting with warnings that even a revised plan for the area near the Carp River is dangerously flawed, they terminated him.
More than a decade ago, Cooper wasn’t the only city engineer worried about a mistaken model for the way water would flow through a huge new development in west Kanata, but he was the most vocal. By his assessment, the city was underestimating the level of the Carp River in severe rainstorms by as much as a metre — an amount of water that could swamp highway bridges and flood 1,000 houses.
In 2005, he lost an attempt to fight discipline for “badgering” his co-workers about the error. But in 2008, the city finally agreed that he was right. It froze planning approvals while other engineers fixed the mistake. The city auditor-general investigated. Then-mayor Larry O’Brien praised Cooper in public for his doggedness.
“His future is safe in this city,” O’Brien said at the time.
But that wasn’t the end of it. Still officially off the file at work, Cooper studied the new water model and concluded even it had been “fudged.” He filed access-to-information requests and brought challenges to the provincial environment ministry.
Finally, in spring 2013, he sent emails to his own manager and then that manager’s boss laying out in detail his concerns about plans to dredge the Carp River and change its banks so it would carry water away faster. In bad storms the water level would still be much too high, Cooper wrote. Parks along the river would wash away. The city’s planning stormwater ponds that would be lower than the bed of the river they’re supposed to drain into. Did the people working on the plans realize that?
“In the email, the grievor (Cooper) expresses his concerns about calculations and the infrastructure issues as he sees them,” wrote arbitrator Deborah Leighton in her ruling. “He also requests specific information within a short time frame and asks if City Council has been informed or ‘whether I should be requesting another investigation to be undertaken by the Auditor General’.”
That got him fired for insubordination.
“After an investigation, the employer concluded that the grievor was acting in violation of the City’s Code of Conduct and was not being respectful to the City or City employees,” Leighton wrote. “The employer took the position that the grievor had been told not to discuss these matters with staff and that he ignored the employer’s directions not to intervene in the Project.”
The trouble is that Cooper’s discipline record was officially clean. To fire him, his boss’s boss – the city’s manager of planning policy Lee Ann Snedden –used old warnings he’d been given to stop bugging people with his fretting about floods. But he’d had nothing added to his file in two years. Under his labour contract, the old letters should have been wiped.
Instead, the human-resources department handed Snedden discipline records from 2005 and 2011, none of which she was supposed to have. (The one from 2005 was when he was pulled off the Kanata West project, after which his persistence probably saved a whole lot of flood damage.)
“Ms. Snedden concluded that he was not a team player, but there was no evidence to support this or that he was not working well on his assigned projects within the City,” Leighton found.
Snedden was doing her best but she’d never fired anyone before and didn’t know the rules, Leighton wrote. Based on her faulty understanding, Snedden recommended that Cooper be turfed and got approval all up the chain, including from city manager Kent Kirkpatrick.
Obviously someone should have known better.
Cooper’s email “was unprofessional and showed bad judgement” wrote Leighton, but ruled that a fair punishment would have been a five-day suspension, not dismissal. That means Cooper gets his job back, plus pay dating back to when he was wrongly fired in May 2013.
The city wanted to pay him off instead of bring him back to work, saying trust in him is irretrievably broken. Nope, Leighton ruled. There’s zero proof of that, particularly since neither his immediate boss nor his co-workers seem to have had any problem with him. They even used to go to him for advice before he was kicked out the door.
“There is some evidence that some senior managers do not trust the grievor not to continue raising issues about the (Carp River),” Leighton wrote, but that’s it. Give him his job. If anybody has problems with the details, bring them to me and I’ll sort them out for you, she wrote.
And now, of course, since it’s been well over two years since he sent that email, Cooper’s record is clean again.
dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
