Each City Council member naturally has his or her own big issues, but in the past three months two council members have stood out for the persistence with which they have seized the role of lonely voice in the wild, with little hope for rescue.
During Monday night’s council meeting, moves were made to address the very different issues bedeviling Elissa Yount and Mike Rainey.
Yount’s request is the more immediate of the two.
Time and again, Yount asked City Manager Eric Williams when auditor Curtis Averette would appear before the council, either at a regular meeting or at a Finance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee session, to answer questions about last year’s audit. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the audit that came in a couple of months late, the one that delivered the accounting blow involving Embassy Square and the phantom $400,000, the one that found Henderson’s fund balance was less than half the Local Government Commission’s recommended minimum.
The council decided last week to submit a list of written questions to the auditor. Each council member was allowed to send questions to Williams to be forwarded to Averette; only Yount did so (see her questions below).
“They’re not hard questions,” Yount said Monday.
But getting the questions to the auditor is only part of what Yount is seeking. She wants a chance to meet with Averette face to face to hear his answers and to ask any necessary follow-up questions. It has long been the council’s practice to meet with the auditor to receive the audit report each year, but that practice was disrupted in early February when the FAIR Committee decided to defer Yount’s initial audit questions until the big public forum the council held on city finances that month. The auditor, however, chose not to attend that forum.
Now time is important. Williams will present his budget proposal for next fiscal year in the next three weeks, and the council has until June 30 to adopt a budget. And Finance Director Traig Neal will be a city employee until only June 1, so time is short to hold a council meeting involving the auditor and Neal.
Williams said he’ll talk to the auditor this week to try to arrange a meeting before June 1, which he said should be possible.
“I would think it would be pretty essential,” Mayor Clem Seifert said.
Rainey’s request immediately followed the auditor discussion Monday night. As he had at several previous meetings, Rainey urged that the city government move ahead with a 2004 proposal to consolidate all of its offices in the Operations & Service Center and sell the Municipal Building.
The city spent $4,000 last year on a preliminary engineering study of the possibility of moving all of the city offices to the Operations Center. The City Council dropped the idea as soon as the estimate of a $300,000 cost came back.
Rainey said he’s sure the Operations Center could be renovated to hold all of the city offices more cheaply, but his efforts to move the idea off the back burner produced no action until Monday night.
This time, Rainey didn’t settle for raising the idea and asking the city manager to keep it in mind. Instead, he asked the council for a vote committing to the move, with next year as the target.
“I know there’s an expense to make this move,” he said. “I think we ought to do it.”
The benefits, Rainey said, include gaining efficiency from having all departments except public safety under one roof, reducing utility expenses, avoiding repair costs at the Municipal Building and producing a cash infusion from the sale of that building.
“I thought it was a good idea to consider it, and once we couldn’t get the most expensive thing in the world done, we just dropped it,” Seifert said, adding that it makes sense to study the idea further before dismissing it.
But Ranger Wilkerson said the city doesn’t have enough money to make the move, which he believes would cost $200,000 to $300,000. And he said he fears that any money raised from the sale of the Municipal Building would soon disappear.
Wilkerson and Rainey disagreed about how much space is available at the Operations Center, a former Lowe’s Home Improvement store. Wilkerson said the city employees would be packed in like sardines in the newer building.
He also wanted information on how much the city actually would save through the office consolidation.
As Seifert’s suggestion, Rainey framed his motion to refer the issue to the Committee of the Whole for further study and discussion of the costs and benefits of the proposed move.
Before joining his colleagues in a unanimous endorsement of the committee referral, John Wester made clear that his mind is made up unless the additional information surprises him about the benefits. “I am absolutely opposed to the concept, but I realize that to find out more, we need to do more study.”
Seifert and Williams will arrange the meeting for that study as soon as possible.
Yount’s questions for the city’s auditor
1. You say in the audit that your internal control would not necessarily disclose all matters in the internal control that might be material weaknesses and that your audit does not provide a legal determination on the City of Henderson’s compliance with the requirements of Government auditing standards. Who should be pointing out to the Council members material weaknesses and who oversees the city’s legal compliance with requirements?
2. Since there was such a material change in the fund balance, how did we get an unqualified audit?
3. When the conference call was made to the LGC on Oct. 13, who was present and privy to the call? What amount of deficit was discussed? What proposal was made to correct the problem?
4. Please explain where in this audit we can find the figures that show the deficit created in the General Capital Project Fund and where this deficit was eliminated. Can you point out where the transfer from fund balance to CIP is and when it took place?
5. Our budget ordinance called for borrowing $900,000. Did the LGC approve or disapprove this borrowing?
6. When were you aware that the city did not have a budget ordinance to cover $395,704?
7. We received a letter for the LGC in 2003 as well as 2004 about our budget problems. Whose responsibility is it to see that we abide by and carry out their instructions?
8. When was the letter of November 17 written? When did you assume the Council members received it? Who actually wrote the letter? Were any of the concerns in this letter discussed at any time with city management in the months prior to the letter being sent? If so please give complete details of all discussions.
9. Your audit report tells us that all disclosures necessary to enable the reader to gain the maximum understanding of the city’s financial affairs have been included. It appears to be a strange choice to put such a significant fact — the loss of all this revenue in the fund balance — on the next to last page and not even name the funds that required doing this. Please give your rationale for this.
10. As a corrective action to say only that the finance officer will be more careful in the future to ensure proper funding for all expenditures seems a little lame when we’re talking about $1.8 million. Please give your rationale for this.
11. How long should original invoices be kept for any capital project?
12. Have our preaudit obligations failed us?
13. Who authorized the interfund transfer that eliminated the deficit in the CIP for Embassy?
14. What does the Council need to do to see that interfund transfers are not made unless they have Council approval?
15. What does the Council need to do to see that we do not expend any moneys, regardless of their source, except in accordance with a budget ordinance or project ordinance?
16. According to The Local Government Budget and Fiscal Control Act, a project ordinance shall clearly identify the project and authorize its undertaking, identify the revenues that will finance the project, and make the appropriations necessary to complete the project. Who is responsible for seeing that this is done?
17. According to the same Act, no obligation may be incurred for a capital project or a grant project authorized by a project ordinance unless that project ordinance includes an appropriation authorizing the obligation and an unencumbered balance remains in the appropriation sufficient to pay the sums obligated by the transaction. Who is responsible for seeing that this is done?
18. In the Operating Budget Policy for the City of Henderson it states that any appropriation of fund balance or the use of retained earnings shall show the current fund balance or retained earnings and how such use would affect fund balances. When and how should this be shown?http lender remortgage credit adversecredit card merchant hawaii wireless accountcredits 10000adjustable check bed with credit no1st credit lincoln choice unioncanadian merchant credit card california accounttax credits leave additional maternitycard lender credit abusive Map