Yesterday's post (June 23) ended with the statement that the County Mayor, who proclaims himself the county's chief financial officer, needs to deal with, instead of trying to avoid, financial questions.
His favorite tactic for avoiding giving answers about the county's finances is to say, "I've already provided that." Yeah, right. Let's look at what he provides.
In regard to building projects, what he has "provided" is often some useless sheet of paper and that useless sheet of paper is all county commission and the taxpayers will get---no explanation, for sure no questions, take-it-or-leave-it.
Example: The Mayor gave Commission a report on county building projects about a year. One of the projects on the report was the Courthouse Addition.
Well, one column showed that the "capital plan" budget for the Courthouse Addition was exactly $2.5 million. Another column was labeled "contracts" --- exactly $2.5 million. A third column was labeled "spent" --- exactly $2.5 million.
If you looked at the labels for each column and the figures, you would probably think that the amount "spent" on the Courthouse Addition was $2.5 million dollars. You would be wrong.
When I asked about the strangely exact "spent" amount for the Courthouse Addition, I found out that the word "spent" on this report only meant the amount of bond money "spent" on this project.
There was other money ($171,000+) "spent" on the Courthouse, but that wasn't put on this report. And, no, there wasn't any asterisk or any note on the report explaining that "spent" only meant the amount of bond issue money spent on this project.
Evidently, everything in the report depends on what the meaning of "spent" is.
So now we have to ask for a definition of the word "spent."
Does "spent" mean all money spent on this project, does "spent" mean only the amount of money spent out of the bond money, does "spent" mean only the amount of money spent out of the general fund!
I'll post the entire Statement that I made to Commission in a four part (I-IV) post with a date of June 25. If you begin with June 25th, Part I, you can then scroll down from I to IV in order.
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