Gunpowder Chronicle posted on August 16, 2007 7:03 PM | Rating:
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The Real Scandal in Salisbury City Government was not that the Mayor tried to ramrod through a water fee increase is not that there was $5 million dollars in the surplus fund than was publicly announced at the Council meeting monday night, or that the Mayor tried to deny council members access to this information.
The real scandal in Salisbury City Government is that at any point during the month, the government offices do not seem to have any type of accurate picture of the City's financial standing.
The simple fact is that Salisbury City Government has an EXTREMELY poor record of financial management. By that, I don't mean there is rampant fraud going on. Rather, I think there are two problems: one is leadership incompetence. The other is rampant obsolesence.
In terms of leadership incompetence, this is a much bigger problem. John Pick and Pam Oland should be screaming at the top of their lungs from the top floor of the parking garage for better accounting systems. A six year old with a lemonade stand, a notebook computer, and QuickBooks could display a more accurate picture of the City's financial picture. That John Pick and Pam Oland -- and the Mayor, and her best buds on the City Council -- are not talking intelligently and forcefully about the need for the city to adopt better processes indicates a little too much comfort with governing in a fog. That is incompetent leadership. It is leadership by distortion. It is leadership the Wizard of Oz way. And citizens should be all over them for it.
In terms of rampant obsolesence, the obsolescence is in terms of PROCESSES and SYSTEMS. The City does not perform month-end closings; it waits until the end of the year. It cannot display an accurate OR presence account statement once a month. The City Council could not begin to understand the real financial picture from month to month. This might have been fine fifty years ago, or even twenty years ago, when expenditures were small. But it is wholly unacceptable today. And it must be fixed.
There is no reason -- no reason at all -- in today's age, that the system could not develop simple receivables and payables processes so that every system could see an accurate and up-to-date financial report the first Monday of every month.
That they can't-- and that the City Administrator seems unaware of that picture -- is the real scandal.