Several councillors said Jones forbade front-line staff from meeting with them and appointed a single person to handle concerns from the city’s 44 councillors. That person was Lisa-Joan Overholt, an employee with close ties to Ford whose hiring and rapid promotion was singled out as one of the five especially “egregious” violations of human resources principles in the recent report.
Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, whose downtown ward includes 19 TCHC properties, met with Jones immediately upon his appointment.
“I think, certainly, he said a lot of the great things I would expect an ambitious and energized new CEO to say. He talked about collaboration and partnership, and I took him at his word,” said Wong-Tam. “What followed afterwards contradicted what he initially said to us, and that was about the partnership and collaboration.”
Soon, Wong-Tam started noticing turnover at the organization, where her staff would often speak with different managers within the housing agency. Then, all contact with the managers ended.
“We were advised by staff and managerial staff … that they weren't allowed to talk to us any more,” said Wong-Tam. “Shortly afterwards, they said all the communication needs to go through one person, and then there was a councillor liaison that was assigned to manage us, which of course was not going to work. You can’t have one person managing all the councillor expectations, because it creates a bottleneck effect.”
