Province pulling funding for ARCHES after audit
By Jensen, Randy on July 16, 2020.
A team of auditors sanctioned by Alberta Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Jason Luan makes their way to the Lethbridge Supervised Consumption Site earlier this year. Herald file photo by Ian Martens @IMartensHeraldTim Kalinowski
Lethbridge Herald
tkalinowski@lethbridgeherald.com
ARCHES (AIDS Outreach Community Harm Reduction Education Support Society) will be losing all provincial funding to run Canada’s most highly used supervised consumption site after the results of an independent audit conducted on the organization revealed serious financial mismanagement.
The audit findings include a catalogue of undocumented or inappropriate expenses charged to the SCS and the “Everyone Comes Together” (ECT) program by ARCHES directors, misuse of credit cards for personal expenses, unapproved overtime billing, and a general lack of strong financial oversight by board members.
The audit found over $1.6 million in provincial funding unaccounted for due to missing documentation from 2017 and 2018. Much of problem, according to auditor Deloitte, stemmed from the fact ARCHES co-mingled all its accounts, and was not able to identify which aspects of the organization were funded by provincial money, (accounting for about 71 per cent of its funding), versus those which were funded from other sources in violation of its grant funding agreement with the province. The agreement required ARCHES to keep a separate account and expense ledger for money coming from Alberta Health.
According to the auditors, among the questionable expenses originally charged to the SCS and ECT by ARCHES management were several thousand dollars worth of staff gift cards and expensive trips, both abroad and within Canada, that did not provide all the necessary receipts for the charges accrued. A $2,205 television was also acquired for the ARCHES board room without providing a receipt, and the organization’s petty cash uses were also not reconciled properly.
Referenced in the audit, one unnamed executive’s salary amounted to about $343,000 in 2018/2019, a sharp increase from $87,121 recorded in 2017/2018. Of that $343,000, $72,000 was charged in overtime expenses that the executive did not seek prior approval from the ARCHES board for, as they were required to do under the organization’s own guidelines.
The funding agreement ARCHES has with the province only allows for $80,000 to be drawn for this executive’s salary, but the auditors were unable to determine, due to the co-mingling of accounts, how much of the executive’s salary was taken from provincial funding versus other sources of funding.
ARCHES has received over $14.4 million in provincial grants over the past two years. Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addiction Jason Luan said he was disappointed an organization funded to help Lethbridge’s most vulnerable should be found so wanting in the basics of organizational financial accountability and proper fiscal management.
“It is disturbing and extremely disappointing to me that taxpayer funds allocated to this organization in order to serve the most vulnerable in Lethbridge, would be used for European conferences, expenses for retreats, entertainment and gift cards,” he says. “Our government will not stand idly by while millions in taxpayer funds are missing or misappropriated.”
Because the auditors could not account for or verify all provincial funds used by the organization, the matter will be referred to law enforcement by the Alberta government to determine if further investigation is warranted.
According to Luan’s office, in order to ensure people struggling with addiction in Lethbridge can continue to receive harm reduction services, the government has asked Alberta Health Services to set up a temporary mobile overdose prevention site in the city as they transition these services from ARCHES.
There is no word from the Alberta government yet as to what its longer term plans for harm-reduction services in Lethbridge may be with ARCHES out of the picture.
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20-019 Grant Expenditure – Health
17-16
The financial unaccountably and ostentatious continuously increasing salary of the director of ARCHES hardly is a surprise. Nor is the unaccounted free spending of the flow of government funds for “trips”, a ridiculously expensive “TV” and other questionable unaccounted expenditures. The salary of the ARCHES director has ostentatiously increased in just a few years, $96,744 in 2017, $207,830 in 2018 and $342,943 in 2019. One could surmize that the flow of government funding is being used as a cash cow and personal money train by the top executive of ARCHES. This entire drug resort experiment was a sham from the start and a public optics virtue signalling experiment gone off the rails. It was a magnet that encouraged drug addicts to travel to Lethbridge to use this as a drug resort while obtaining free drug paraphernalia and supplies at the same time. Some media reports state that at times, there were copious amounts of needles freely dispersed to addicts which exceeded any normal amounts for a person’s own use. As well, dirty used needles litter the surrounding playgrounds and sidewalks and drug dealers ply their trade of selling illegal substances in the vicinity to addicts while the police are discouraged to intervene. Hopefully in the next civic election the voters will voice their dismay with this debacle and turf out the Mayor and the other councilors who believed that the degradation of the city in the name of virtue signaling and public optics was a good idea. https://calgarysun.com/opinion/columnists/bell-lethbridge-drug-site-a-shocking-mess-uncovered
Finally, a modicum of common sense. I hope the Mayor and Council don’t determine that the city should bankroll this now. Those who really want help will now be able to access it through legitimate channels.
And bonus: this will make life sooo much easier for our new police chief!
I too am very concerned about our idiot mayor and all but 2 idiot alderman trying to foot the bill for this. Do you remember how badly those two aldermen were vilified by the rest? I do, and I will again come election time. Vote them out and stop the waste.
Within a few months after ARCHES opened the SCS,
the public started pressuring the mayor and council to address the corruption, the crime, the bio hazard debris, etc, etc. Thousands of emails were sent, and thousands of phone calls were made, all to no avail. The public were shrugged off. Perhaps it’s high time our mayor steps down…and while we’re at it, audit city hall.
How will a bunch of addicts roaming the streets make the new chief’s job easier??
There’s more info in this article:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-pulling-funding-from-lethbridge-supervised-consumption-site-1.5651413
Well if you wanted to make Alberta great again Jason and company, You have taken one huge leap forward by defunding this boondoggle of a “S..t S..w.”
The addicts existing prior to SCS. They don’t just disappear.
I wonder if “questionable unaccountable expenditures” might have been payola to certain individuals to assure continued support for the SCS? Just wondering…..