Last Thursday afternoon, city top bureaucrat Richard Butts abruptly announced a re-shuffling and downsizing of city staff, resulting in five middle managers immediately losing their jobs. Reportedly, the five were escorted out of their offices, lest they take home paper clips or trade secrets.
The five laid off employees are: Andrew Whittemore, manager of community relations in the Community Development department, who worked closely with the special events task force; Doug Rafuse, also a community development manager; Linda Shay, a nurse and labour relations specialist; Paul Flemming, a manger in the Finance Department who oversaw budget and financial analysis; and Wayne Legere, who worked in Transportation and Public Works in “service delivery and quality improvement.”
I crossed paths most often with Whittemore and Rafuse; both struck me as extremely hard working and knowledgable. Whittemore was closely tied to the concert loan scandal—there’s no doubt he knew that the Paul McCartney and subsequent concerts had true attendance figures much lower than was publicized, but he was in the untenable position of not being able to do anything with that knowledge, so long as his bosses and the mayor didn’t want a public spotlight put on the failed concerts.
Rafuse was in the midst of a massive study of recreation facilities; he seemed to strike the right chord as a public servant, offering up analysis without taking a position, but his work was perhaps lately clouded by what I would characterize as an overly aggressive pro-stadium PR campaign coming from his department, perhaps also reflecting the influence of the mayor. In any event, the lay-offs were not related to performance, insist city staff.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2011.
Why did this happen? Butts throwing his weight around or necessary improvements?
Butts is rapidly becoming the most despised person on the HRM payroll. Morale is sliding down the shitter faster than a donair through a nun.