Faulted for bad advice to division
Winnipeg Free Press
Wednesday September 7 2005
By Mia Rabson
THE executive director of the Public Schools Finance Board has been moved to a different department just three months after he and the board were faulted for allowing a Winnipeg school division to improperly develop residential lots for sale.
Officials with the Department of Education confirmed yesterday Robert Goluch is now working in the Department of Intergovernmental Affairs. Education Minister Peter Bjornson would not discuss Goluch's move yesterday, saying it was a confidential, human resources matter.
Bjornson would not say whether Goluch was forced out or moved voluntarily. But Tory education critic Myrna Driedger said the staffing change is clearly related to a land development scandal in Seven Oaks School Division.
The division spent more than $2 million to develop over 70 residential lots in north Winnipeg between 2002 and 2005, on land that had been acquired to build a school. The Public Schools Act does not allow school divisions to be land developers.
But the division received approval for the scheme from the Public Schools Finance Board, which oversees all capital projects in school divisions.
Driedger raised the issue in the legislature in May prompting a departmental review of the matter. That review found the school division failed to acquire proper legal advice prior to developing the land, but placed most of the blame for the scheme at the feet of the Public Schools Finance Board. The report called the board's actions in the process "highly unusual," and said the board members and staff of the finance board failed to do their job.
Bjornson was embarrassed when the issue was raised in the legislature because he initially said he had no idea what Driedger was talking about. But the next day Bjornson was forced to admit a private citizen had written to him about it almost a year earlier.
The review report says the complaint was forwarded to Goluch for review, who wrote a letter that was signed by Bjornson and sent back to the complainant. The letter told the man to take it up with the school division or city hall because it was a "local issue" and that they had jurisdiction.
The report says Goluch and the finance board did not properly investigate the complaint, and that "the letter prepared for the Minister's signature was incorrect and inappropriate."
Goluch did not respond to a request for an interview yesterday.
Driedger was livid at the news Goluch was no longer in his job yesterday. She said it was clearly an attempt by the NDP to find a scapegoat to direct attention away from its own involvement in the scandal. "The Doer government is on a witch hunt to protect their NDP friends on the board and to protect an incompetent minister," said Driedger.
Driedger has written to Auditor General Jon Singleton to ask him to review the matter.
mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca