Thursday, January 30, 2014
Commission Takes No Action On Resolution That Questioned Expenditures
Members of the county’s governing board took no action Thursday on a resolution questioning expenditures made through county government between the dates of March 26 and June 25, 2013.
The resolution called for, “The County Executive to furnish copies of all checks or warrants written on Lawrence County between the dates of March 26, 2013 and June 25, 2013 that resulted in a particular line item of departmental budget to be in excess of the budgeted amount.”
Commissioner Neely Luna, who co-sponsored the resolution, addressed the board. “I’m not saying they’s anybody done anything criminal,” he said. “I’m going to refer back to the minutes of the budget meeting dated Wednesday, May 29, 2013 where we’re discussing the budget amendments…They was thirty-something thousand dollars come out of the General Fund into accounts. The budget amendments was sponsored by the budget committee and the budget committee had not even saw it. It was sent back to the budget committee.
“In that budget meeting…the budget director stated, ‘I’ve already wrote the checks.’ I think that we don’t need to be writing checks until the money’s approved. Especially when we’re dipping into what I call new money out of the General Fund, or fund balance. Don’t know that any of these checks hit that. I think the County Executive has the authority to do that under an executive emergency order, but he was asked that night and I think if he had’ve issued an executive order he would’ve known.”
Luna continued, “Anyway, I’m asking that the checks be turned over to all county commissioners and us make a decision whether that we need our internal audit committee to look and see why this happened, how it happened, and what we can do to keep it from happening again. Because we certainly don’t want to be writing checks on Lawrence County where the money has not been approved…I’m only basing this on the minutes in the budget meeting. If there’s no checks there’s none to turn over. But if they were checks wrote where the money was not approved, this is asking for them to turn them over to the commission. “
Lawrence County Budget Director Teresa Purcell asked to comment on the matter. She explained some of the expenditures in question. “One of them happened to be for the laptop that sits right up there and runs this meeting. Another one happened to be $700 for audit services that were required immediately when the state said, ‘We’re going to go in and audit a business.’ That wasn’t in the budget. Another check that was written was when the unemployment rate went from 1.2% to 1.7%. The state sent us a letter so we had to automatically pay that unemployment. Those are the types of things that I have to write checks for.”
“How often do you guys meet,” Purcell questioned. “If you guys want to meet every two weeks with me and get everything approved ahead of time, that would be great. But the county has services that they have to provide. I can’t stop paying people. We can’t stop business. I don’t know what you expect me to do. That’s the only thing that was written. There were a lot of budget amendments on here. The checks that were written previous were things that had to be written.
“We don’t do anything fraudulent or criminal. I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what’s being implied here. I don’t appreciate it. But we are doing what we have to, to keep county government going. I explained that in that budget meeting that we had that night.”
Purcell went on to say, “I had commissioners call me about it because they were offended as well because of what was implied. Those budget amendments were not passed. Right now this is the way that we have to conduct business. We do have to write checks on occasion before they come to you guys.
That is audited. If I only did budget amendments once a year they would have a problem with it. This is audited. They look at this. Every county has to do this to operate. If you want to inflate lines during the budget and just put huge amounts out there, we’ll never have to do budget amendments. That’s fine, but you’re going to have to explain that to your taxpayers when you increase the tax rate. That’s the choices that have to be made.”
Commissioner Wayne Yocum requested that the matter be tabled for the time being. “Mr. Luna, your resolution is requesting the checks,” he said. “I think that that should not be any problem at all. I think that you should be able to get anything that you want out of the budget office. I know I certainly can and I think any commissioner here can, and I sure don’t oppose you going down there and getting any one of those checks. But I make a motion that we table this.”
With the discussion ended, commissioners voted 15 to 2 to table the resolution.
