By Sebastian Kanally, Times Chronicle

There are still only questions surrounding the conflict of interest investigation being conducted by the Regional District of the Okanagan-Similkameen (RDOS) into CAO Bill Newell’s offering of a $60,000 contract to Sundog Solutions, which his daughter is founder and primary consultant. 

The RDOS held a meeting on March 8, 2023, to discuss the emergency program review and the possible conflict of interest with the CAO Bill Newell. 

There was just under five minutes of publicly available video before they went into the closed meeting (referred to as “in-camera”). In this first segment they were discussing briefly how to proceed. 

Director Julius Bloomfield, Mayor of Penticton noted, “I think we are going to quickly get into some conversation that should be in a closed meeting, so I think we should probably go into closed sooner rather than later.”

Chair Mark Pendergraft articulated that he is “almost of the same opinion” and that “it’s going to be difficult to separate that in my mind.” Referring to things that can be said in public, as opposed to comments that require a closed meeting. 

On that topic Pendergraft said he had to note for the record that, “we can go in-camera [a closed meeting] on the grounds of personal information about an identifiable individual.”

The meeting took several hours and afterwards Pendergraft released a statement, emailed to the Times Chronicle simply saying: “The matter regarding the RDOS Emergency Program Review was discussed in-camera at Committee on Wednesday, March 8, 2023. This is a human resources matter, which will be dealt with during the next RDOS Board of Directors meeting scheduled for Thursday, March 16, 2023.”

The matter has already been pushed twice. On Feb. 16 the matter was pushed because of “some glitch in our director member email” Newell explained. Resulting in not everyone receiving Newell’s response to the board about the matter. Then on March 2, it was pushed because of a lack of board members present. 

So the matter is now being pushed a third time to March 16 in what is now referred to as a “human resources issue”.