It has been almost a month since Jim Taylor resigned from his position at Westmoreland County Administrator. The resignation came in the wake of the discovery that many loans from Rural Development were neglected and the County was dangerously close to defaulting on them. Although the loans were taken care of, the damage was done and a great deal of penalties had accrued.

Transparency is something that Chairman Tim Trivett and the other supervisors have been especially keen on in these past few months. Their dedication to transparency was reaffirmed last Wednesday at a special meeting, during which Supervisor Matt Ingram made a number of comments and sought to answer several questions he had been receiving.

“In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been contacted by a lot of county citizens with questions, and I wanted to address some of these concerns,” stated Ingram. “I’ve been asked about how this all happened, what the total penalties were, and so on, and I wanted to put those answers on the record.”

According to Ingram, the total penalties came out to about $104,045.

“A number of people have been asking about Mr. Risavi being back,” Ingram continued. “He is, but in the capacity of finance—and only finance—to build policies and procedures to keep this from happening again. I think that all board members should know everything that’s going on. I’ve been on this Board for three years now, and there are certain things I have asked for and have yet to receive. One of those things is the end of the month Control Report.”

The Control Report outlines where the County’s money is being spent.

“If that is too much to ask as a Supervisor, then I think every citizen has a right to ask. They have a right to know where the money is being spent, and whether it’s being spent wisely.”

These sentiments were echoed by Vice Chairman Jeff McCormack, stressing the importance of systems.

“I think it’s important that we bring it out to the public as well because I have received those same questions,” McCormack commented. “Phone calls, text messages, emails about what in the world has happened over the last ten months in Westmoreland that requires us as supervisors to be involved in either our finance department or with our money that goes out.

“We have a budget. Revenue comes in, money goes out, and it’s not rocket science. Some of the questions I’ll have when we go into closed session today are about what we are doing daily, weekly, and monthly to make sure this never happens again. Back when I was in the Army, we had daily, weekly, and monthly checklists for stuff you had to have done by the end of that time period. We followed those checklists to make sure we did everything right.

“I agree with Mr. Ingram. We need to have a reconciliation memo done monthly, signed off either by the county administrator, treasurer, or financial department. We have an accounts payable and payroll memo that we receive in our board packet each month, but that’s it. We need a third memo that details what accounts have been reconciled each month.”

Supervisor Darryl Fisher noted, “We never had this problem under the previous county administrators. The information was always available, and we had an administrator that

Photo: Mikhail Nilov

we could trust to watch the proverbial chicken house. When you lose that, we’re going to have to put some policies in place that we can monitor if we have to, and it’s unfortunate that we reached the point where we had to.

“In the past, we’ve been very fortunate to have a staff of individuals that stayed on top of this. We’ve never been in this position in the last thirty-two years.” he said. I agree that we should always be aware and be in a position to be able to answer questions from the public. Going forward, hopefully we can work out a system that keeps this from happening again. We did not get our bond to the rating that it was by being haphazard in our finances, and I don’t want the public to believe that this is standard practice. This whole thing was an anomaly.”

“I think it’s extremely important that the public understand that when Risavi retired, the assistant county administrator and finance director did too, all at once,” added Trivett. “Anybody that we hired that came in afterwards did not know those processes and procedures to the extent that their predecessors knew. Even if we hire somebody tomorrow, they’re still going to be stuck learning the processes and procedures. No matter what we do, I think we’re in a position that we can only go up from here. I look forward to us trying to figure out where we’re at in the next couple of weeks.”