A recent municipal council meeting erupted in heated discussions following requests to make part of the audit public.
Councillor Laurent Lacour submitted a number of written questions to the mayoral council and aldermen at the end of August, receiving written answers a month later. However, he was of the opinion that he had received acknowledgement of his questions without proper answers, leading him to raise the issue again in a municipal meeting on Tuesday.
He wanted the Commission for access to administrative documents, CAD for short, to be asked for an opinion to clarify whether the audit could be published in its entirety or in an adapted version. The aldermen pointed to an opinion given by a lawyer, which said the publication was not possible and made no sense, reiterating that they had no desire to publish the audit just as it is.
Tensions were running high, leading to mayor Claude Gleis losing his temper somewhat.
"I can only appeal to the council, let's make peace and finally put an end to this nonsense. All this is extremely annoying and it is only pushed by one person here at the meeting, and everyone can hear it and understand it and we have all known you for a long time, Laurent. Although you're a good person, you have a [crappy] manner of always provoking things and people don't like it, they told you this during the elections."
The argument that the audit was an internal document and could therefore not be published was not sufficient for Lacour, as he refused to drop the subject.
"To accuse me of causing trouble here, I would do the same in your position, because things are getting out of hand here. There's the fact that your lawyer still classifies this as internal communication, he gives a number and when I go to look at the number, I notice that the administrative tribunal has already ruled on that and has come to the conclusion that an internal communication can no longer be internal at that point if an external provider is involved in it."
While Lacour agreed that personal information pertaining to municipal staff should not be made public, he insisted that the question of political responsibility required an answer.
Alderman Fränk Kuffer responded:
"Of course we have made mistakes. The people before us made mistakes too, without these it would never have got to this point. But we're doing all we can to rectify those errors, the work is taking place, and even the auditor had plenty of cooperation and worked well with everyone."
Mayor Gleis also acknowledged that errors had been made, but emphasised that it was clear no one would be made to step down as a result of these. In the meantime, he said a number of things have been improved in terms of internal organisation, and the mood had improved as a result.
Lacour's demands that the CAD opinion should be requested and followed by a publication of the audit were subsequently rejected by the council, with 7 votes against them, one in favour, and one abstention.
Lacour responded that he would not let the issue lie, and that he would consider publishing the version of the audit that was available to him, under the condition that it would respect private information of staff members.
