Another meeting, another fiscal mess. That’s the story Edgewood town staff shared with town commissioners during recent public meetings as they explained in June how the town had failed to collect hundreds-of-thousands of dollars for city services over several years and in July why the town manager had to use his personal credit card to buy gas for police cars.
During a July 14th commission meeting, Town Manager Hamilton told commissioners that Edgewood is on the hook for several credit cards in the names of people the town no longer employs. That became a crisis when cards the police department used to buy fuel were suspended over a weekend. Police Chief Aaron Frost told commissioners Hamilton provided his personal credit card so officers could fuel their vehicles.
Hamilton said the town’s new fiscal manager Amber Sanchez discovered six business cards issued by Wells Fargo Bank, with credit limits between $1,500 and $6,000. The combined balance on five of those is more than $11,000, he said, with the other account holding a credit. “They are (in the) names of former employees that have not been here for a long time,” he said. “And I’m going to make it very clear that there is no way the four of you and the previous commissioner could have known any of that at all.”
Hamilton said the prior process involved payments being made among cards, and some of the accounts have ended up in arrears. “This is the kind of crap that we can’t keep doing, and we’re not going to do,” he said. “I apologize for the language, but I’m pretty emotional about this because when it comes to … the town manager’s having to donate a credit card to keep the police department operational for three days.”
Sanchez said the town has canceled those cards and is switching to a procurement process.
At the June 23 meeting, executive assistant Tina Montano told commissioners about a quarter of the properties hooked up to the town’s sewer system are not being billed for those services, which has meant more than $200,000 in lost revenue over the last couple of years. She said she discovered that after a property owner called to inquire about why it hadn’t received a bill. Montano said the town is working to determine its options for recovering the unpaid sewer fees.
Montano said she’s not sure why those properties haven’t been built, or whether fees associated with connecting sewer service were ever paid.
Hamilton said the town is working with the Mid-Region Council of Governments to evaluate its utility billing rates, “because there is a drastic inconsistency from one business to another.”
Sanchez also told commissioners that she had discovered accounts in the name of the town in the amounts of approximately $6,500 and $225,000 which the town currently has no way to access.
Reboot Edgewood, a group seeking to disincorporate the town, included those incidents in a recent mailer supporting its cause as it continues to collect signatures on a petition forcing a vote to disincorporate the town because of fiscal mismanagement which included the near-loss of fire service and years of sloppy bookkeeping with tax dollars.