WE NEED PUBLIC RESTROOMS, NOT SMOKE AND MIRRORS. Over the past two years, the City of Pensacola has spent over $200,000 in Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) funds to make improvements to city hall, with over $60,000 spent on renovations to Mayor Ashton Hayward’s seventh floor office and adjacent reception area. Those expenses never went through the budgeting process and were not approved by the city council. Councilman Charles Bare wants to know why. Bare has submitted two agenda items for next Monday’s agenda conference that relate to the LOST expenditures, and he’s asking the council to investigate the matter. “I am very concerned about the lack of transparency in this administration,” Bare said. “The mayor talks about transparency but his actions speak louder than his words.” According to documents Bare received via a public records request, the seventh floor spending includes almost $17,000 to install a partition wall separating the mayor’s offices from the seventh floor lobby; over $9,000 for a reception desk outside the wall; over $5,000 for four chairs, a table and bench for the seventh floor lobby; and $1,170 for a door lock. Much of the work was done by Contract Resources/Arte Ditta, a Pensacola-based company owned by Teresa Dos Santos, who was also one of Mayor Hayward’s appointees to the Urban Redevelopment Advisory Committee. LOST and found LOST funds, also known as Penny for Progress funds, are described in the annual budgets as sales tax dollars that were approved by the voters of Escambia County to be used “to acquire, construct and improve general government, parks and recreation and public safety infrastructure to promote the health, safety and welfare of all residents.” Additionally, the Penny for Progress dollars are used to purchase capital equipment like police vehicles and trucks and grass mowers. “LOST funds must be focused on the needs identified by the citizens who voted to authorize them,” Bare said. “I find it hard to believe the best use for these funds is a $558 bench on the seventh floor. The projects should be presented and identified in the budget where the public can review them.” While many Penny for Progress capital projects have descriptions in city budget documents, there has never been any description for a project entitled “city hall improvements.” It appears only as a single line-item among over 200 projects, nestled among such items as “new brush mower attachment” and “trailer barricade(s) replacement.” It is also, for some reason, included in the list of capital equipment projects for the Public Works Department, which is located in a separate facility nearly three miles north of city hall. Retroactive budgeting Furthermore, the “city hall improvements” project does not appear in any budget until FY 2013, which retroactively lists $1,800 spent in FY 2011 and a projected amount of $73,200 spent in FY 2012. (The actual FY 2012 amount, revealed in the FY 2014 budget, was $77,701.) Likewise, the FY 2014 budget puts $121,499 in the FY 2013 column, even though the FY 2013 budget did not project any additional funds for the city hall improvements project. In other words, in both years, the city council and the public were only made aware of the city hall spending after the funds were already spent or planned to be spent. “I am not arguing the merits of whether city hall needed renovating,” Bare said. “It is the way it was accomplished and the source of funding that are the problems. By not identifying this expenditure in the 2012 budget, the administration tried to avoid a public discussion.” It was difficult to make public records requests regarding these expenditures, due to the arcane system the city uses to identify transactions (e.g. “Cost Center: 389041 Penny for Prog”) and narrow interpretations of requests (e.g. differentiating between “furniture” and “seating”). Yet invoices and expenditure documents show that spending was indeed anticipated in advance of the 2013 fiscal year. For example, the lobby furniture proposal from Contract Resources was received in July 2012. Finally, in order to pay for the city hall improvements, money had to be taken from some other Penny for Progress budgeted project or capital equipment purchase. A review of an “Expenditure Transaction Analysis” report shows that $100,000 was transferred to the “city hall improvements” project on December 21, 2011 — just a few months into FY 2012 — but does not indicate from what project or capital equipment purchase the funds were taken. As Bare states in his agenda item, “These funds were spent in lieu of some other project.”
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 14:41:01 +0000
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