Career dogged by controversy

Views about Bert Meunier’s legacy in Kingston may differ but his goals were never in doubt. He wanted to modernize the municipality and foster accountability with tools to gauge city spending, delivery of services and operations. Fluently bilingual, the native of Granby, Que., studied at University of Montreal and later the University of Western Ontario. He met his future wife Mary Frank (Frankie) during university. His formal education completed, Meunier began working at Gaspe College.

He then worked as recreation director in the Ottawa suburbs of Vanier and Gloucester before joining Quebec City in 1984 as an administrator. His task in Quebec – to find savings. Meunier introduced a new financial plan for the city of 165,000 and worked to build cost-saving measures from the ground up. In five years, his plan helped cut Quebec City’s basic tax rate in half. The money saved was funnelled into economic development to lure new industry. Former Quebec City mayor Jean Pelletier told The Whig in early 1990 that Meunier’s vision helped dig the city out of economic hardship. “Bertrand Meunier is one of the key architects of the betterment of this city,” Pelletier said. “Not only did he make the budgeting process much better than it was before, he allowed us to keep control of our expenses all year around.” The city recognized Meunier for his work and appointed him as one of four deputy city managers.

The Canadian Association of Municipal Administrators gave him an award for management excellence. In an interview with The Whig, he attributed the success of the budget reformations to solid planning. “In city planning, the three most important things are priorities, priorities, priorities,” he said. The promotion to deputy manager put him in line for the city manager position in Quebec City, but he chose instead to apply for Kingston’s chief administrator job when it became available in 1990. “I’ve only been a deputy manager two years here [in Quebec City]. I feel that my natural career move is to be manager of a city the size of Kingston, rather than go over the heads of people here,” he said at the time.

Before his arrival in the city, Meunier said he was looking forward to bringing change. “If people are going to solve their problems, they’re going to have to work together and that’s the key to this approach,” he said. At a reception welcoming him to town April 19, 1990, Meunier warned his new employer that he wasn’t a miracle worker. “I think people expect me to be able to walk on water,” he said. “I didn’t work miracles in Quebec. I think my role was more co-ordinating the people who worked the miracles.” Meunier’s enthusiasm and solid track record was met with a divided Kingston council, anti-francophone sentiment and attacks by some councillors as a result of his appointment behind closed doors. Councillors had hired Meunier in a secret ballot.

Then-councillors Bill Jamieson and Trevor Wilson said three city managers – city treasurer Rick Fiebig, city solicitor Norman Jackson and city public works administrator Ken Linseman – had applied for the job but were turned down. Jamieson said people were phoning him asking why the city “was giving the job to Quebec people.” Both Jamieson and Wilson were censured by council for publicly revealing the names of the three failed candidates. Both councillors countered by asking the Ministry of Municipal Affairs to investigate the hiring. The ministry concluded in November 1990 that Meunier’s hiring as CAO was proper, but that council had violated the Municipal Act by using a secret ballot. Ministry official Dave Cooke said he felt “the decision is valid and that no action by the ministry is warranted.”

Meunier quickly went to work, introducing a new budgeting system and setting city priorities through strategic planning. He also guided council through capacity crises both at the dump and the sewage treatment plant. Despite the successes, Meunier found himself in his second year advising a fractured council. To outsiders it appeared a deep split had developed between councillors who supported Meunier and others still backing public works administrator Linesman. Meunier was also attacked by councillors Ian MacInnis and David Meers, who claimed he failed to consult the city about a plan to restructure the public works department. By October 1992, Meunier had his fill of Kingston. He announced he was leaving to accept a similar job in Kanata, a growing Ottawa suburb.

He rejected any notion he was leaving because of anti-French sentiments. “I didn’t have any problem,” Meunier said. “I’m not saying there weren’t any bigots here, but because of the things in the paper about how certain councillors had felt about hiring a francophone, citizens and the business community went out of their way to be sure we felt welcome.” Councillor George Stoparczyk fumed that Meunier may have been pushed from the job. “Given the kind of treatment he was faced with by council in general, I can’t blame him,” Stoparczyk told The Whig at the time. “I wonder how he survived this long.”

Six years later, in January 1998, the city dumped its sixth chief administrator in nine years – Rick Fiebig – as three communities merged to form a new, bigger city. Kingston began the hunt for a new chief administrator – and it turned again to Meunier. He came back to the city in the wake of a rancorous public debate about Fiebig’s failure to win the job. Meunier refocused on his drive to modernize City Hall. In an interview with The Whig on Aug. 6, 1998, Meunier said he’d learned from his highly political first go-round in Kingston and would apply his experience to the years ahead. “I have learned to take a more low-key approach and to stay out of the political arena and keep to my role as an adviser and executor of public policy.”

Meunier’s term proved easier than he expected under mayor Gary Bennett, a university graduate in municipal administration. One of Meunier’s first big challenges was a strike by 700 municipal workers in September 1998. City Hall was shuttered as workers threw up picket lines. Both the mayor and the CAO were publicly attacked for a city decision to hold a council meeting Sept. 22, in the midst of the strike, from which the public was barred. Fearing that the meeting could be deemed improper, the city later repeated council session. Meunier tried to reach out to unionized striking workers by picking up the tab for more than a dozen pizzas and handing out the free grub at City Hall. He called it a “corporate gesture ? a show of support to employee morale and an indication that we’re still a corporate family.”

After the strike, more controversy loomed. The city selected a developer with an unproven record to build a proposed $211-million convention centre complex on waterfront property on Ontario Street. The Block D project polarized the city and led to power struggles between junior managers under Meunier. The project was killed by the city in October 2000. Two major shifts in city operations occurred amid the acrimony between senior city managers. Councillors abolished standing committees in favour of a streamlined system under a committee of the whole, which Meunier said was inclusive. “If you want to make representations, the best way is to be reinvented as a committee of council,” he said. A committee of the whole would prevent standing committees and others from having a “privileged corridor” to council. In November 2000, Meunier also brought forward a sweeping and controversial restructuring of the city’s bureaucracy. Approved in secret session by councillors, Meunier abolished the department of strategic and long-range planning and created four “superbureaucrats” to manage massive departments. The move did away with 12 senior manager positions at City Hall and saved money, Meunier said. The removal of the strategic and long-range planning department as well as popular manager Mirka Januszkiewicz caused an outcry. Januskiewicz later sued the city and settled for an undisclosed deal. Some councillors claimed Meunier was “out of control.”

Other attempts to usher in new policy were also controversial. Meunier issued a confidential memorandum advising senior managers not to speak to the media unless cleared to do so by in-house communications staff. “It is preferable to co-ordinate key message statements through the communications unit, in consultation with the CAO,” Meunier wrote.

In December 2000, Isabel Turner was sworn in. Her term was marked by turbulent council meetings rife with bickering and personal attacks. Meunier stuck to his mission to create more responsive and efficient municipal services. He criticized the city for what he saw as a slow-footed planning approval process that was driving away potential business. “Companies can’t come to you and have you say the zoning is wrong and you’re going to take six months to do a public process and consult and this and that, because they’ll just go somewhere else,” he said. Meunier also complained that the city’s roads, sewers and bridges had been allowed to deteriorate for years because past councils were bent on keeping property taxes low. To properly dissect the city’s $250-million backlog of infrastructure projects, Meunier proposed in September 2002 to begin priority-setting sessions that would rate the importance of projects. He asked councillors to rank 100 projects to get a sense of which ones should receive top priority. “There’s not on week that goes by that there’s not a new project and they are all important,” Meunier said at the time. Meunier continued in the spirit of efficiency when he announced that fall that the city would review and weigh all city services in a quest for savings. In December 2003, he watched as Harvey Rosen was sworn into office. By 2004’s end, Meunier’s well-laid plans for a long-term budget process that protected city residents from sharp tax hikes were finally realized. Working on the latest budget, city managers found $1.7 million in savings.