Lachapelle offers apology for April outburst, but not all councilors seemed to buy it

Deputy Mayor Pete Lachapelle with a late mea culpa (City of Rochester screenshot)

ROCHESTER - Mayor Paul Callaghan announced during Tuesday's City Council meeting that the city's ethics policy will be revisited at August's codes and ordinances with an eye toward creating an ethics board that would oversee ethics complaints filed by individual councilors.
The matter came up during the meeting's final agenda item titled "Review on status of alleged ethics policy violations by Deputy Mayor Peter Lachapelle," who on April 18 delivered remarks that angered several board members whom he called a "cancer" on the City Council.
During his remarks last night Lachapelle apologized to the council members he had targeted, including Steve Beaudoin, Dana Berlin and Laura Hainey.
"In hindsight I should have chosen my words more carefully," said Lachapelle. "I let my emotions get the best of me and caused some unnecessary anger and discomfort and for that I apologize and I'm truly sorry."
Beaudoin accepted the apology, but said Lachapelle's public comments denigrating the three should never have happened and urged the creation of an ethics board that could handle complaints more quietly, out of the public eye.
"What happened here highlights the need for further modification of the ethics policy, we need an ethics board," Beadoin said.

Neither Hainey nor Berlin publicly accepted Lachapelle's apology during the meeting. Hainey also put forth a motion to keep Lachapelle from doing any more ethics investigations, but the motion didn't get a second.

Later on during the meeting Callaghan said the codes and ordinances committee will be looking at creating an ethics board.

The next codes and ordinances committee meeting is set for Aug. 3.