Thursday night will be budget time in Vance County with a fiscal doubleheader.
County Manager Jerry Ayscue will present his “proposed budget estimate” for 2005-06 at 5 p.m. in the commissioners’ meeting room on the second floor of the Vance County Administration Building.
Henderson City Manager Eric Williams will unveil his spending plan at 7 p.m. during a meeting of the City Council’s Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee in the conference room at the Municipal Building.
In case two budgets in one night aren’t enough excitement, City Council members also expect to meet with insurance company representatives to sort through options for city employees’ health insurance for the year starting July 1.
Police Capt. Mike Davis addressed that issue during Monday night’s Speak Up Henderson forum. He hoped to dispel a rumor that employees’ health insurance premiums would rise 21 percent in the new fiscal year.
Davis did not get the answer he was looking for.
Williams advised that the city has reduced the likely increase by bidding out the health insurance plan, but the increase for both the city and employees will be significant.
“I know you’re shopping for the best prices, but even right now, really and truly I’m scraping really now trying to make it with the coverage now,” Davis said. “When you start talking about increases of that amount, how are we going to survive?”
Mayor Clem Seifert said the city isn’t in any better position to pay the increased costs. “Health insurance is going to ruin us all.”
He said the city might consider raising the deductible and the maximum out-of-pocket expense to keep deductibles as low as possible. The current $500 deductible and $2,000 maximum expense is “the Cadillac of insurance policies.”
“I don’t talk a whole lot,” Davis said, “but it’s time to talk.”
Williams plans to present a spreadsheet of possibilities to the FAIR Committee on Thursday.
The final fiscal bonus Thursday is a tentative plan for the council to receive answers to at least some of council member Elissa Yount’s 18 audit-related questions.
Williams said he and outgoing Finance Director Traig Neal will answer what they can and leave the rest for auditor Curtis Averette and a representative of the state’s Local Government Commission at a time to be named.
Seifert told the council Monday night that he never endorsed the idea of a private meeting for the auditor to answer Yount’s questions.
“If they’re legitimate questions, they need to be answered in public,” the mayor said.
He also said Averette claimed he could answer only one of the 18 questions and needed the LGC to answer the rest. Seifert likes the idea of having the LGC send a representative, although the reported impossibility of any such visit until mid-July is a problem.
“If that’s the only time they can come, please call them and make dog-gone sure that’s the only time they can come,” Seifert said he told Averette.
“If he can only answer one of those questions, that disturbs me,” Yount said. She said most of the questions are straightforward points about the audit.
As he has said several times, Williams said he could answer several of the questions. Seifert read him one: When was the auditor’s letter dated Nov. 17, 2004, written?
Williams said he has explained multiple times that the date on that letter represented the end of the auditor’s fieldwork, thus eliminating any mysterious gap between the completion of the audit and the release of the document to City Council members at the end of January. But Williams could not answer the actual question: When was the letter written?
“I personally don’t know because I didn’t write it,” Williams said.
In addition to the 18 answers, Seifert said he’d like to see a list of each check the city wrote for the Embassy project and when. Yount said the receipts were gathered in one place at the Municipal Building last fall, but she couldn’t find that packet when she looked for it again a few months ago.
Aside from such specific concerns as misplaced receipts, Yount said she “was very concerned to find out that the auditor had not been requested since February to come before us, and I had asked repeatedly.”
She made a motion, seconded by Mary Emma Evans, for the council to direct Williams to arrange for Averette to appear to answer the questions.
“I don’t understand what the big deal about it is,” Ranger Wilkerson said. “If we’re going to pay $28,000 for it, let the man come in. … It’s been a drawn-out thing.”
The council backed her motion 7-1, with Harriette Butler opposed. She did not explain her no vote.
Williams said the air of distrust starting with the public forum on the audit Feb. 28 has played a part in the auditor’s reluctance to appear for public questioning. The city manager said no one would want to face an inquisition.
Seifert said he didn’t see how written, straightforward questions could be considered an inquisition.
Other than look unfavorably on any bid from Averette’s firm, William L. Stark & Co., for future work, it’s not clear what the City Council can do to compel the auditor to appear for public questioning. The City Council has never had such a delay between the receipt of the audit and an opportunity to ask the auditor questions.