Haldimand County residents and municipal councillors are still in the dark about the financial fallout of Mayor Shelley Ann Bentley’s decision to use strong-mayor powers to fire former chief administrator Cathy Case.
But this year’s Sunshine List sheds some light on what happened after Case was fired last June.
The veteran civil servant was paid $280,702 last year according to the province’s 2025 public sector salary disclosure, which was released on Wednesday.
Case worked at the municipality for more than 30 years, becoming CAO in 2023.
Several months before she was fired without a vote of council, Case and her counterpart in Norfolk County, CAO Al Meneses, launched an investigation into a leak of confidential documents that was eventually traced to Bentley’s office.
The Haldimand mayor did not publicly explain why she fired Case, but she denied it was payback for the investigation.
Haldimand’s integrity commissioner, David Boghosian, later determined Bentley leaked the documents in an attempt to meddle in last February’s provincial election. The mayor was docked four months’ pay.
During the March 3 council meeting, Coun. Rob Shirton asked Bentley when councillors would receive a confidential update on “settlement news or where things are at with our previous CAO,” referring to Case.
“I don’t know why things are dragging on and why we can’t get a meeting in closed (session) to discuss this more,” Shirton said, adding he was “dumbfounded” that Bentley has the authority to fire the CAO and then authorize a settlement “without any consulting of council.”
Bentley said she would check in with staff and prepare an update.
As of Tuesday, councillors had not received that update, Shirton confirmed to The Spectator. He hopes to see a closed-session item pertaining to Case’s dismissal on the agenda for the April 7 meeting.
“The frustrating thing for us is the mayor has the ability to negotiate everything herself without keeping us in the loop,” Shirton said in an interview.
“So we might not even get anything (at the in-camera meeting), but at least we want to ask her some questions and find out where things are at.”
Simcoe native near top of Sunshine List
Haldimand had 125 employees on the Sunshine List in 2025, up from 27 in 2019.
Following Case were five general managers — Daniel McKinnon from public works at $252,614, Mark Merritt from financial services at $227,857, Mike Evers from development services at $224,218, Tyson Haedrich from engineering and capital works at $224,218, and Megan Jamieson from corporate services at $209,648.
Case’s successor, Michael Di Lullo, started at Haldimand in November after departing as CAO of Middlesex County. The public salary disclosure shows he earned $210,972 last year.
Meneses was the highest-paid of the 154 Norfolk employees on the Sunshine List, followed by a trio of general managers — Heidy Van Dyk of corporate services at $200,769, Bill Cridland of operations at $204,634, and Andrew Grice of public works at $199,142.
There is a Norfolk connection near the top of Sunshine List.
Simcoe native Nicolle Butcher, president and CEO of Ontario Power Generation, was compensated to the tune of $1,598,309 in 2025, good for second place on the list.
Butcher will be one of the speakers at the Norfolk Frontier Innovation Forum in Delhi on April 9.
The daylong gathering organized by the Simcoe and District Chamber of Commerce and Norfolk County will also feature talks by Ontario tourism minister Stan Cho and Olympian Cassie Campbell-Pascal.
By J.P. Antonacci, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on Apr 02, 2026 at 10:05
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