Finance Director Traig Neal said there’s nothing significant about the timing of his resignation; this just happened to be the time when Oxford accounting firm Winston Williams & Creech needed a seventh certified public accountant on its staff.
The opportunity was too good to pass up, Neal said. “It’s just what I want to do right now.”
Neal, who submitted his resignation this week, is departing city service June 1, the date by which City Manager Eric Williams must submit his budget proposal to the City Council. Neal has been crunching numbers, paring departmental requests and looking for revenue since at least mid-March, when the departments handed in their spending plans.
The biggest part of the finance director’s responsibility for creating the budget will be over by the time Neal leaves, but he acknowledged in an interview Friday that he would have preferred to see the budget process through to the end. Unfortunately, he said, Winston Williams & Creech couldn’t wait.
“They contacted me,” Neal said. “This is when the opportunity was offered.”
The job change will bring more predictability to his schedule, and the extra time with his family is a nice beneift, Neal said. But the schedule wasn’t a significant factor in his resignation.
The timing is related to the budget schedule for counties and municipalities around the state. All must complete their budgets for the July 1 start of the fiscal year, and accounting firms send in their people to conduct annual audits soon after. (Winston Williams & Creech was an unsuccessful bidder for Henderson’s audit business the last time the contract came up.)
Neal will be doing some of those governmental audits, but he said his primary responsibility will be the traditional core of the CPA business: income tax returns.
The timing of the change isn’t unusual in Henderson. It was late May 2001 when Neal was hired from the private sector to serve as finance director. His departure will be almost four years to the day later.
He said the move to Winston Williams & Creech doesn’t represent permanent disillusionment with government work. He won’t rule out a return to municipal service someday, but now “I was ready to make a change.”
“He’s a nice man and a good boss,” said Neal’s top aide, Peggy McFarland, who faces the task of preparing the budget book for submission to the Government Finance Officers Association without Neal‘s guidance.
Neal will leave Henderson in a far different financial situation than how he found it.
In May 2001, the city still was a center of textile and tobacco jobs, major capital expenses for both sides of Embassy Square still lay ahead, and Gov. Mike Easley still hadn’t raided local funds to balance the state budget. At the end of fiscal 2001, Henderson had a general fund balance of more than 30 percent, right around the average for a city its size.
By the end of fiscal 2004 last June, the fund balance was below 4 percent, and taxes and sanitation charges had been increased to counter the loss of $50 million from the tax base.
Neal said the city’s financial troubles, including the failure to obtain proper budget authorization for an overrun of more than $400,000 in city spending on the Embassy cultural center, had nothing to do with his departure, nor does he think they will deter qualified candidates from seeking his job.
He said the city’s finances are cyclical. The fund balance dried up in the early 1990s, Neal said, but Henderson built it back up to more than 40 percent by the end of that decade. “The city has been in this position before, and it came back out.”
The weak but not fatal financial position could be a positive for job applicants, Neal said. The money situation is only going to improve, he said, and the next financial director could get the credit, deserved or not.
“No one person caused it,” Neal said of the financial mess, “and no one person is going to fix it.”