Breaking News (1-14-09)

The first is Pay Your Property Taxes by Thursday at 4:59pm!


City Messes Up Checks Again

By now many of you have read The State’s article by Adam Beam (http://www.thestate.com/local/story/644694.html) and today’s editorial (http://www.thestate.com/opinion/story/649774.html) criticizing Charles Austin. The city has been paying the same bill 2, 3, 4 times, among other accounting problems, such as being years late in reconciling its books. Surprisingly, someone in the editorial (who knows who actually writes these as there is no name or names claiming ownership) department has decided that Austin is not competent to manage the city: “He deserves a failing grade.”. This is a surprise as the editors have been some of the city manager’s greatest cheerleaders. Why now they change their minds? These problems and inadequacies have been going on for quite a long time, which they could easily see had they read the stories of their own reporters. Incorrectly, they continue to blame the problems on the system (“Unfortunately, the buck stops nowhere in the city’s council-manager form of government, with responsibility divided among the unelected manager, the weak mayor and the six other council members, four of whom represent single-member districts.”) rather than the people in the system. Never do they point out that Charlotte and Greenville have a system like ours, and neither has the problems that our politicians generate.

What is the breaking news? Two things, city wise. I received a call today that the city failed to deduct taxes from payroll checks. I called others to confirm it and received positives. It appears that the city just found out today. How does the city fail to deduct taxes? I understand that taxes have been deducted all along, so why the failure now? What are the inherent problems that allow the city to double and triple pay bills for years without any oversight? And to miss payroll tav deductions? What else is there that we do not know?

The other item brought to my attention is that upper echelon staff at city received year end bonuses of 3%. Yet the lower level workers were initially told that they could not bonuses, turkeys, gift cards, or COLAs. As I have been told, these bonuses were possibly hidden in accounting, and that council may not be aware of them. To discover them, it would be necessary to FOI all city checking accounts and payroll records. This I will leave up to the local news media, most of whom read this newsletter.

Lets see what, if anything, is reported in the media on these.


On The Record Voting Passes the House

The other breaking news:
According to Nikki Haley’s newsletter today, this passed the house: http://nikkihaley.com/2009/01/14/on-the-record-voting-passes-the-house/#comment-64. This is good news, but in reading her comments, I am not sure that everything is to be voted on the record. I posted this on her comments section and hope to get a clarification : “This is a good start, and I have supported you and Nathan all the way. But something concerns me as you said “virtually”, not “all”. In reading what is to be recorded, it appears some items may not get a recorded vote.
Please clarify.”
I mention this as a comment I received from an astute reader and one close to the issue pointed out to me the loopholes in what speaker bobby Harrell proposed for recorded voting. It appeared to be transparent, but had so many exclusions that it was only slightly better than nothing. In reading Nikki’s comments, I feel that some of these loopholes may still be there, and that this bill may be one strong armed to some extent by those not wanting recorded voting on all issues.
Read it yourself and comment.