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Issue 34
SERVING THE ENERGY CITY FOR 113 YEARS
www.estevanmercury.ca
Wed., Jan. 6, 2016 Mailing No. 10769
Cornerstone victimized again by trusted employee By Norm Park normpark@estevanmercury.ca
New Year’s Baby Kellan Bath checked into the world at 5:15 a.m. on Jan. 1, making him Estevan’s first baby born in 2016. Kellan at seven pounds and four ounces and just under 20 inches, was born to Katie and Josh Bath, a brother for Aurora (pictured with her new brother) and brother Kain.
Council receives little feedback for budget By David Willberg dwillberg@estevanmercury.ca
For the second straight year, Estevan city council has received little public feedback for its budget deliberations. Council held their first public discussions about the budget during their meeting on Monday night. But the only person to speak to council about the document was Jackie Wall, the executive director of the Estevan Chamber of Commerce, who brought forward some concerns from the business community. The messages were sent to the chamber’s office during the Christmas holidays.
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The chamber followed up with the responses, and Wall told council at Monday night’s meeting they will send council a summary report. She expects many chamber members will be concerned about the new business license bylaw that is coming into effect. “I believe we will have more questions on that from our membership, and they’ll want more clarification,” said Wall. “The city has been very forthcoming in getting all that information to us prior, so we have time to go through it, and so that we have knowledge of it as the comments and questions come in.” The city’s property
tax gap is also a source for concern in the business community. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business calculates the property tax gap each year by dividing the commercial property tax by the residential property tax for properties worth $200,000. Estevan’s property tax number was 3.29, meaning commercial property taxes were more than triple their residential counterparts. Estevan ranked 14th out of the 15 cities in the province. Wall said she received three or four correspondences. But the chamber office was closed during the Christmas holidays, so
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she will continue to accept letters and emails for the next few days. Jeff Ward, who is the city manager and the acting city treasurer, admitted he was disappointed that nobody else voiced concerns at Monday night’s meeting. Council was hopeful the public feedback would have come in before Monday night. “People were always asking for transparency. They wanted more information,” said Ward. “And now we’re taking the steps to do that, and we’re still getting nothing back. You’re still going to have the people who come in just to complain without being here Feedback ⇢ A2
The South East Cornerstone Public School Division has had to contend with another financial loss due to intentional corrupt actions by an employee. It’s the second fraudulent incident to hit the division within the past year. The most recent information was contained in the report by the Ministry of Education concerning financial losses to school divisions due to fraudulent or disruptive behaviour by employees between September of 2014 to the end of November 2015. The incident in the Cornerstone division occurred in December of 2014 when an employee intentionally destroyed computer system data that impaired the division’s ability to run its computer management software. The damage to the school division was $5,425 with Cornerstone being able to recover just $3,000 from the unnamed employee who had resigned his position on the Monday morning following his weekend sabotage. “He terminated his employment himself and left on his own accord. The act was intentional and when he tendered his immediate resignation and then we discovered we couldn’t access the management program, it wasn’t difficult putting the pieces together,” said Shelley Toth, chief financial officer for the public school division. The formal name for the sabotaged sector was Systems Centre Configuration Management Software. “We have large groups of computers that can be managed from central locations by rolling the software out to them. It helps larger businesses like ours to work with others remotely,” said Toth who added the division’s computer system didn’t shut down, just the management segment. The costs were stacked up through the amount of employee time spent on the corrections and
that included Cornerstone personnel as well as Microsoft experts. Toth said there were both “hard and soft costs involved in this situation.” It took three days to restore the management software system. After the employee left, follow-up contact with him was made through Cornerstone’s legal department which negotiated the partial repayment scheme. Toth said it was not known if the former employee had gained employment elsewhere in the province. “We didn’t collect the full amount. That was something our lawyers decided to settle on with his lawyers, I suppose. They didn’t want to take the issue to court.” Cornerstone also fell victim to a long-distance telephone fraud incident last year which resulted in over $8,000 in costs to the division with partial repayment by the perpetrator of about $5,000 also being the end result. That incident was reported earlier. Toth said the matter was brought to the board and was discussed with the school division’s auditors. The person who sabotaged the software was in the technical department and therefore had access to the management systems. The former employee held a trusted position within that section, and therefore the auditing team determined there wasn’t much that could have been done to prevent this particular incident since it was a matter of the employee belying the trust that had been placed in him to operate in a professional manner. The only other financial loss in the province in the Education Ministry’s last reporting period was suffered by the Northwest School Division where a third party breached the division’s voice mail system and therefore was able to charge fraudulent long-distance phone calls to the school division. That matter cost the Northwest School Division $5,326, with insurance covering all but $1,000 of that loss.
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