Fake Accusations, easy to make, but you should be able to back them up if you make them | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's note: This post appears courtesy of the Beaufort Observer.

    During the fast and furious fray at the July Commissioners meeting about charging the $350,000 of surprise billing for a jail inmates medical costs to last year's expenses six commissioners suddenly started accusing me of covering up stealing in the Social Services Department. The preceding sentence is a mouth full so I will break it down to make it understandable.

    The issue being debated was whether or not the $350,000 medical bill for a jail inmate who had been sent out of the County for safe keeping should be charged to expenses during our last business year or the present business year. All county governments in North Carolina begin a new business year on July first. If the expense were taken after July 1 the Sheriff's Department would start out the year with a budget deficit and would have to work hard to stay under budget during the coming year. If this expense is taken last year, it has the effect of making it look like you have $350,000 more to spend this year than you actually should be showing. If you pay it out of this year's appropriations you have less to spend. Some call it "smoke and mirrors" accounting.

    Another reason this is important is that we prepared a budget for this year based on expenses from last year. But, the Commissioners were not informed about the $350,000 until the end of June. So we could not consider it in the budget. Had we known we may could have taken the money to cover this expense from other line items in this year's budget and thus reduced the need to draw down the fund balance as they decided to do. At least we should have considered how to reduce health care costs for inmates and weighed those expenses against other budget needs/requests.

    Don't miss this important point. When large, unexpected expenses hit us you don't always need to take it out of fund balance. You may could cover it by reducing other expenses. These Commissioners act like Congress and just cover the expenses rather than reducing expenses. We have a run-away train in jail medical expenses. We are headed for a train wreck unless the Sheriff gets a handled on those expenses but that is not likely to happen if we just suck more tax money out of the taxpayers.

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    Taking the expense last year means we reduce the un-appropriated fund balance by another $350,000. That's money that could have been used to reduce the tax increase these six commissioners dumped on us. The advantage to all the bureaucrats, the Sheriff and the Manager, is that this expenditure is buried in history, out of sight and out of mind. They don't need to weigh how to tighten things up to cover the unexpected expense.

    My arguments that the expense should be taken in the present business year was because we did not know about it until this year, we were not asked to approve the payment until this year and we need to ask the Manager, and the Sheriff how and why we suddenly got a bill for $350,000 with the Manager and the Sheriff both saying they did not know anything about it. This is a surprise bill. Surprise bills are always serious problems for any business, but Beaufort County Government is more interested in finding a way to make the issue disappear rather than how to make sure we get no future surprise bills.

    Normal accounting would say the charge should have been made when the check was dated, which would have meant this fiscal year if done properly. None of this speaks to whether the bill has been audited and verified as correct. That's another issue.

    I felt like I had all six commissioners down in the dirt when they pulled a switcharoo. They decided to start accusing me of being dishonest. They never said, and did not want to say, what they were accusing me of. Just that I had covered up stealing in the Social Services Department.

    After some investigating, I found, they were talking about an employee of a contractor for Beaufort County. He was not a county employee and not an employee of Social Services. The contractor reimbursed the county and the issue was settled. A report was made to the Board of Commissioners in closed session because it was a personnel matter. So why drag it back up now?

    I am saddened that these six men are of such small character that they would take an event such as this and deliberately use it to try to smear my integrity. In addition they violated the integrity of the closed session. If they had a complaint, they should have presented it during that closed session. Where is their integrity?

    Each of these Commissioners owes a public apology to all our employees who work in Social Services because the way they handled this it besmirched all Social Services employees by implication because the individual responsible was not identified, as every one of these Commissioners knew it would not be disclosed because of confidentiality laws. The important thing is that while I was serving on the Social Services board the entire matter was fully disclosed in closed session and confidential personnel matters were kept confidential, as it should have been done. Neither I, other members of the Social Services Board or the management of Social Services were responsible for the inappropriate behavior, it was handled appropriately and the county was made whole and it was duly reported to the Board of Commissioners. So why was it brought up in a discussion of the jail expense issue?

    It is an abomination that these men who are sworn to protect the public are un-concerned about the skyrocketing costs of health care in the jail, not just because of this surprise bill, but because it is an exploding expense on the taxpayers. Their interest is more toward covering up the issue than in reducing costs and holding the Sheriff and Manager responsible. Of course the Commissioners have the same responsibility for mismanaging the County's money as the Sheriff and Manger. Could it be they were more interested in protecting themselves than the tax payer? Do you reckon it had anything to do with this being an election year? We have a problem in health care costs in the jail and the public needs to be fully informed about it, election or no election.

    Through all of the mis-spending of county money, whether it is the 1.6 million dollars for plans for a jail that was never built or the use of County employees to facilitate the destruction of the Belhaven Hospital or their failure to control overtime in the Sheriff's Office or to stop the use of County property for the personal gain of employees, these six have steadfastly stuck together to give our personnel cover to waste our money.

    Frankie Waters, as the leader of this pack, should have better judgment. It is his duty as chairman to put such matters before the Board for debate, and action where needed, and to insure that the public knows what is going on. The chairman's failure to act is complicity. Steps could and should have been taken to curtail this medical expense on the county's taxpayers. The Sheriff and Manager should have a system in place that monitors health care costs and take appropriate action to curtail such costs. And we still don't have a systematic way of preventing the same kind of thing from happening again in the future. That is inexcusable. And what does that have to do with Social Services?