Responding to last week’s column about the Board of Supervisors’ financial reporting shortfalls and inconsistencies, Fifth District Supervisor Ted Williams wrote:
“Mark Scaramella wrote: ‘Which is it then? Is the County’s finance/budget computer system faulty? Is the ‘thinking’ faulty? Is the CEO incapable of using the accounting data to provide meaningful reports?’…
“Mark, the county’s accounting system is not capable of producing the reports we expect today. When the county transitioned from the old workflow into the then-new software, the migration appears to have been done without fully considering what the new system could and could not produce using that legacy flow. At the end of the day, accounting software is just a database and a database can only generate meaningful reports if the underlying structure and inputs are sound.
“This issue spans multiple departments, including those under the Board of Supervisors and those under independently elected officials. Addressing it would be a multimillion-dollar effort and would require coordinated collaboration across departments. Without that effort, we will continue to see the same outcomes.
“While upgraded software might improve the workflow, it is also very likely that much of the workflow could be corrected within the current system if it were properly analyzed and reconfigured.
“The solution costs are software licensing, support and staff time. The status quo costs are the outcomes we see today.”
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As usual, Supervisor Williams avoids the necessary particulars to form the basis for a useful exchange. Somehow his individual County departments are capable of managing their budgets reasonably well as we periodically but randomly see when department heads discuss their budgets. The Sheriff, the DA, the Planning Director, the Probation Chief, the Auditor-Controller/Treasurer Tax Collector, the Clerk-Recorder-Assessor, the Transportation Director, the Library Director, etc. all seem to have a decent grasp of their budgets and actuals. We never hear them complain about the software during their budget presentations.
Neither the Board, including Supervisor Williams, nor CEO Darcie Antle have ever asked for a department by department monthly or quarterly budget breakdown, even though 1. We’re sure the Departments are generating them, and 2. Lately the CEO’s office has been including full department by department budget vs. actual (expense) snapshots with percentages for each line item. Surely, this could be the basis for adequate departmental budget reporting without “a multimillion-dollar effort.”
We recall the Williams-led drumbeat leading up to the entirely unjustified unpaid suspension of Auditor-Controller/Treasurer Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison during which Williams regularly berated Cubbison for not providing financial reports that Williams and (former) Supervisor Glenn McGourty said they wanted. Every time those complaints arose prior to the suspension, Ms. Cubbison politely requested that Williams and McGourty provide examples from other counties of what they wanted. But Williams and McGourty weren’t listening, blindly repeating their misdirected and unfounded Cubbison complaint over and over. Cubbison also correctly pointed out that she could provide revenue status reports, but that up-to-date budgets vs. actuals for expenses are the responsibility of the departments and the CEO. Again, no response. To this day, we have yet to see Supervisor Williams tell us exactly what he thinks is missing from the existing budget tracking system/software that would magically make them “the reports we expect today.” (“We,” of course, being Supervisor Williams; none of his colleagues seem to care.)
Therefore, the problem, such as it is, lies at the CEO and Board level, not with the software, and not with the departments. Nor is it likely that a “multimillion-dollar effort” would fix whatever reporting problem Williams is talking about.
For a small example, after reviewing the Sheriff’s budget status report buried deep in the CEO’s latest report the other day it appeared that the Sheriff’s extremely high workers comp expense for his patrol division was running much higher than the workers comp for the jail. When I asked the Sheriff why, he knew right off the bat that for some reason they pay workers comp for Patrol once a year and it was fully paid, but workers comp for the jail is paid quarterly. This raises an interesting question about the budget-busting workers comp cost (yet another overpriced insurance racket to begin with that the state should pick up, if it must be paid), but not about departmental budgeting.
If Williams and his colleagues were serious about budget tracking, as I have suggested time and again for years, they would invite each department head to submit annotated monthly or at least quarterly budget reports based on the existing reports the CEO is now producing, and ask them to explain any significant variations and where they expect to be at the end of the fiscal year. (This would also have the salutary side-effect of giving the Board a better understanding of department operations and problems.)
Or take the County’s two soon-to-open new facilities — the Psychiatric Health Facility and the new wing of the jail. If they were serious, the Board would ask Behavioral Health Director Dr. Miller and Sheriff Kendall to submit staffing, scheduling and budget plans for these facilities.
But so far, despite these large and glaring info gaps with major budget and personnel implications, the Board has expressed zero interest. (Not only do these facilities require specialized staff which will be hard to employ, train supervise and manage, but most of them will be high-salaried people, many of them paid out of the overdrawn General Fund.)
We suggest Supervisor Williams stop speaking about vague, grandiose “multi-million dollar” software fixes that he can’t define, and look in the mirror.
Mark Scaramella is the Managing Editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser and a long-time Observer of County operations.
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