A senior alderman has promised to pay back thousands of dollars to the Corporation of Hamilton for personal overseas calls made on his Corporation cell phone.

Former Deputy Mayor David Dunkley has agreed to pay the outstanding charges by tomorrow, according to a statement put out by the Corporation yesterday in response to questions from The Royal Gazette.

This newspaper has copies of two Corporation telephone bills showing that Mr. Dunkley made international calls amounting to $1,363 in March last year and to $1,030 the following month.

And a source claims he racked up bills totalling almost $7,500 between June, 2006 and April, 2007 — none of which he has yet paid.

A January 2008 memo from the Corporation's treasurer seen by this newspaper shows payments to Cellular One between those dates.

The memo includes a list of eight amounts beginning with $454.33 in June 2006 and ending with $1,030.19 in Apri,l 2007. The source, who would not be named, said the list referred to the costs incurred for Mr. Dunkley's personal international calls, which were paid for by the Corporation with Hamilton taxpayers' cash.

Mr. Dunkley agreed last week to sit down with The Royal Gazette yesterday to explain the situation. But the Corporation's public relations company Troncossi contacted us to say he would no longer be doing so.

A spokeswoman said: "The Corporation of Hamilton has arrived at an agreement with Alderman David Dunkley who will settle his outstanding cell phone balances in full by April 9, 2008."

The spokeswoman confirmed that the Corporation was not chasing any other members for outstanding cell phone bills.

Asked a series of further questions including the exact amount owed by Mr. Dunkley and why he was allowed to keep his cell phone despite the outstanding bills, we were told: "The Corporation of Hamilton has nothing else to add."

This newspaper's A Right to Know: Giving People Power campaign calls for publicly-funded bodies such as the Corporation to be more transparent about how taxpayers' dollars are spent.

The source said the Corporation issued a BlackBerry or cell phone to every member and paid the bill each month. But members are told that they have to meet the costs of any personal overseas calls.

"In David Dunkley's case there are thousands of dollars worth of calls over a period of time," said the source, adding that the Corporation paid the bills for a number of months without alerting Mr. Dunkley to the excess amounts.

"They suddenly realised," said the insider. "Somebody said 'what on earth is going on? His phone makes thousands of dollars worth of calls a month'. Somebody should have flagged it up much sooner, but they didn't. I think he has had free rein for a while."

The source said Mr. Dunkley had been promising to pay back the money for "some time" but had not yet done so.

Mr. Dunkley became a common councillor on the Corporation in 1997 and an alderman in 2003. He stood in as Acting Mayor when former Mayor Jay Bluck took ill in 2006.

An inquiry was recently launched into allegations that he and councillor Graeme Outerbridge are not bona fide tenants of the city and are therefore ineligible to serve on the Corporation.

That matter has been passed to the Corporation's lawyers. Asked yesterday what stage the investigation was at, the Corporation spokeswoman would say only that it was "following a legal course".

This newspaper has had its attempts to gain information on visits overseas by Corporation members rebuffed. We asked for details of publicly-funded trips and the costs incurred over the last four years.

The spokeswoman said: "The majority of travel undertaken by Corporation representatives over the last four years was in connection with the waterfront development and the possible Par-la-Ville hotel."

She would not answer further queries.

Are you a taxpayer in the City of Hamilton? Do you think the Corporation needs to be more open about its spending? E-mail arighttoknow@royalgazette.bm