The mayor of Whitchurch-Stouffville, Ont., has been docked a month’s pay and ordered to apologize after an investigation into a secret, “CSI-like” photo grid of city residents and co-workers found in his office bathroom.

City council voted unanimously to punish Mayor Justin Altmann on Tuesday, following the release of Integrity Commissioner Suzanne Craig’s findings from a six-month investigation into the photo wall. The investigation was prompted by a complaint filed in March 2017, when an individual reported a “CSI-like” photo wall featuring city councillors, employees and co-workers in the mayor’s office bathroom. The grid of photos is connected by flow chart lines and clip art signs with messages such as “hired,” “you’re fired!” and “you are dead.”

“In the affidavit, the complainant states that they had been approached by co-workers, who had ‘stumbled upon something very evil in the mayor’s bathroom’ and were afraid for their safety,’” the integrity commissioner’s report says.

Craig says several of Altmann’s staff alleged workplace harassment during the course of her investigation.

But Mayor Altmann’s lawyer is challenging the findings from the city’s integrity commissioner, and calling for a third-party probe into what he says was a “mind map” exercise meant to “connect the dots” between a series of alleged anonymous deliveries to 12 residents in the city in 2014. Altmann’s lawyer said in a memo the alleged packages were meant to “discredit, threaten and harass the mayor,” and that Craig’s conclusions were “unfair.”

Craig acknowledged Altmann’s stance on the case, but said the location of the display is still “unreasonable.”

“Even if the respondent was instructed to draw some form of a ‘mind map’ to link the events he was alleging to have happened to him, it is clearly unreasonable to have done so on the walls of a public building, together with photographs of staff, members of council and private citizens with captions such as ‘you are dead,’” Craig said.

Coun. Hugo Kroon said he wasn’t happy with the mayor’s refusal to simply accept Craig’s findings and apologize.

“I am troubled by the mayor’s as of yet refusal to reach out to staff and others on the wall and even attempt to offer any sort of apology or acceptable explanation for his actions,” Kroon said in a statement.

Council ruled that Altmann must apologize within 90 days.

With files from CTV Toronto