By REID TUCKER
The parking lot at City Hall was as packed as the agenda at the first DeFuniak Springs City Council meeting of 2015, but two items in particular loomed large over the proceedings.
The holders of the finance director and city manager were both potentially on the chopping block.
First, the Council cast a majority vote to terminate the employment of Finance Director Thomas Carman, who had been on staff with the city for nearly two years. Councilman Mac Work, who made the motion to fire Carman, effective the end of the current pay period, called for the termination primarily because the finance director was, at various times, two-to-four months behind on the city book-keeping.
Prior to making his motion, Work told the Council that the 2012-2013 city financial audit was returned with 63 adjusting entries (journal entries made to record any unrecognized income or expenses for a given pay period or to correct mistakes made previously in the same period). Work said the large number of adjusting entries, when there are normally as few as five per audit, played into the auditors’ having $160,000 in billable time for their work, which they are likely to ask for even if the city won’t have to pay the full amount. Finally, Work said Carman had been given the option to resign prior to his termination being brought up at the Council’s first session of the year.
“I’m to the point where I’m just tired of trying to make it work,” Work said. “We need to get the city brought forward and get our next audit ready.”
By way of explanation, Carman said 23 adjustments in ’12-’13 audit were carryover entries from before his tenure with the city, and also that the audit in question was the first he had ever worked on, coming on board at the end of the process in January 2013. Carman said the adjusted trial balance provided to him by the auditors matched up with city books in the majority of cases, but those entries were still included in the audit even though, in his opinion, it was unnecessary to do so.
“When I checked it, it didn’t appear to me that…the majority of [the adjusting entries made for checking the fund balance] needed to be made,” Carman said.
“When I looked at the books of the city with the adjusted trial balance, if they weren’t dead-on they were within reason. ‘Reason’ is not $100,000; ‘reason’ is under $1,000.”
City Manager Sara Bowers, herself the city’s longtime finance director, said Carman did on occasion come to her for help regarding his preparation of the audit, but he did not ask about the 23 adjusting journal entries made before he started with the city. Bowers said that, in her experience, “99 percent” of such journal entries have to recorded within the balance sheet.
Councilman Kermit Wright, who voted to terminate Carman’s employment, expressed his lack of confidence with the state of the financial department even if he liked Carman personally.
“My concern is that he’s been here two years and we’ve been behind the whole trip,” Wright said. “As postmaster, I would have been run off. As director of Arc I would have been dealt with. We can’t run a city operation and be behind consistently and for this long. We can’t run a city government like that.”
The Council returned a 4-1 vote in favor of firing Carman, with Councilman Mac Carpenter casting the lone nay vote. He did this because, as he said, the city has “bigger problems than just what is written in the audit report.” Carpenter’s dissenting vote segued directly into the next major item on the agenda, which concerned a possible termination of Bowers in the position of city manager.
Carpenter based his decision to include the item on his understanding of the city code, reaching the conclusion that Bowers had not lived up to her responsibilities as city manager. For instance, he said a member of the public, not the city manager, brought it to the Council’s attention that the audit was late.
“If we’ve got adequate grounds to terminate the finance director, I think we have adequate grounds to terminate the city manager,” Carpenter said. “The city manager is the one person we look to to be responsible for our operation of the city of DeFuniak.
“I don’t think our city manager has fulfilled the duties and responsibilities required by our code. We sat here for nine months at least without the city manager reminding us that the audit was late.”
However, despite making his position known, Carpenter decided not to make a motion to terminate Bowers, instead saying he would “wait and see,” as he didn’t think he could get the votes at the time of the Jan. 13 meeting.
Prior to any discussion about the aforementioned agenda items, City Attorney Clayton Adkinson made the details of two telephone conversations between Carpenter and Bowers a part of the public record.
Adkinson told the Council that Bowers received calls from Carpenter last week asking if Work’s motion to terminate the finance director was still on the agenda, which Bowers confirmed. That being the case, Carpenter then indicated he would include an item on the agenda potentially leading to a motion to fire Bowers as well, a message which was to be “passed on” by her. Adkinson included these details in the public record so as to avoid any possible Sunshine Law violation, particularly if it involves an attempt to use a third party, in this case the city manager, to communicate city business between Councilmen outside of an official meeting.
