Last week Westlock County Chief Administrative Officer Peter Kelly publicly announced that he’ll leave the municipality at the expiration of his contract on Feb. 28, 2016.
When the county announced they had hired the former Halifax mayor in September 2014 we, along with many ratepayers, were perplexed.
Without question Kelly is a seasoned politician with years of municipal government experience, albeit from a different province and as a politician, not an administrator.
And then there was the baggage.
During his tenure in Halifax Kelly was involved in some well-documented financial scandals, something county politicians apparently didn’t know about when they hired him.
“We had limited knowledge of some of the issues during the hiring process,” reeve Bud Massey told the Westlock News last September.
It seems absurd since a simple Google search reveals all … hopefully a lesson has been learned by the men hiring the municipality’s next CAO.
But we digress.
We said at the time of his hiring and we’ll restate here: residents should only care about what Kelly does for Westlock County. So now, 14 months into his abbreviated tenure, the questions begs: is Westlock County in better shape?
All thing considered, our answer is a tentative yes.
Kelly has managed to help the county update a number of its bylaws, some that hadn’t been touched in almost 25 years. He’s also currently working with council to update its Land-Use Bylaw and Municipal Development plan. And to his credit Kelly has been a driving force on cleaning up the issues surrounding the Tawatinaw Valley Ski Hill Chalet.
But it hasn’t all been roses.
Kelly was behind the controversial buyout plan that was offered to all county employees in October 2014. Also under Kelly’s management long-time fire chief John Biro resigned, but was quickly reinstated after a failed experiment of appointing regional chiefs to the position on a rotational basis.
And then there was the whole Clyde firehall fiasco last fall …
No one man deserves all the blame, or all the credit, for an organization’s success or failures, and the same must be said for Kelly, who in our estimation ultimately deserves a passing grade as CAO.
