Departures prove costly for city, BSD

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/06/2022 (1336 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When the Brandon School Division’s annual compensation report for 2021 was released this week, there was an unwelcome surprise for local taxpayers.

Topping the list of the division’s highest-paid employees was the superintendent.

That would make sense, given that the superintendent is at the top of the chain of command, but it wasn’t incumbent Mathew Gustafson at the top of the list.

It was the departed Marc Casavant.

Near the beginning of last year, Casavant took an unexplained leave of absence in January and officially left his position about a month later.

A motion passed at the division’s board of trustees meeting on Jan. 25, 2021, to appoint Gustafson as the acting superintendent implied that he had unofficially assumed Casavant’s duties on Jan. 4.

That leaves very little room for Casavant to have done much work for the division in 2021, but he still made $225,336 that year, according to the compensation report.

Board of trustees chair Linda Ross said last year the departure was for “personal reasons,” but we don’t know anything else, including if he was paid leave from the time he stopped performing his duties to the time he left the position.

Not only did that top the list of salaries paid to a division employee, but it’s also a hefty raise from his 2020 salary of $192,570.

Gustafson, by comparison, made less than his predecessor at $202,908 in 2021.

When the Sun requested clarification on this issue from the division on Wednesday, Ross confirmed the information was correct but wouldn’t comment any further.

Given that we do not know any of the circumstances behind Casavant’s departure more than a year later and we know he didn’t do much if any work for the division in 2021, the most logical conclusion is that Casavant was paid a large severance fee.

The decision to remove Casavant, however it played out, cost six figures for a school division that had to slash more than 10 full-time equivalent teaching positions and desperately cut programming to make up for a $1.2-million deficit.

Tax money paid for an executive’s severance fee instead of our children’s education, and the school division appears uninterested in providing any sort of accountability or transparency into what happened.

Unfortunately, it’s the second year in a row that Brandon residents have had to absorb the costs of an expensive uncoupling.

Last year, when the City of Brandon released its 2020 compensation report, former city manager Rod Sage topped the list of highest-paid employees with a salary of $213,519.41.

That happened despite Sage having not been on the job since the previous year, when he was put on paid leave after it was discovered that a woman had overdosed on purple heroin at his house and subsequently died in hospital.

Though he officially retired in February 2020, he made more money that year than any previous year of his fairly lengthy employment with the city.

Like the school division, the city also declined to comment on the Sage issue except for confirming the information was accurate.

There are limitations to what organizations can discuss regarding personnel issues.

But when it comes to hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money, we can and should expect funds not to be frittered away.

Going forward, perhaps both the city and the school division should be more careful about who they’re appointing to their highest-ranking positions, lest Brandonites have to foot the bill for another high-profile public figure departing under questionable circumstances.