BY MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
GLASGOW NEWS 1
Park City’s city commission heard Monday from the accounting firm, Hensley & Throneberry, that performed the audit on the city’s financial records for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2022.
“Our opinion is unmodified, unqualified,” Steven Throneberry reported early in the regular monthly commission meeting, with his teammate Carter Jones next to him. “It’s the highest level of assurance that any public auditor can give on financial statements.”
He said it means they found no material changes that needed to be made to the financial statements for them to be in compliance with official Government Auditing Standards issued by the federal government.
That statement did not come, though, until he had pointed out a few specific items.
Throneberry noted that there have been three city clerks in the past year, “so anytime you have some transition from that, things end up happening, things end up maybe slipping through the cracks or just not done the same way as they always have been.”
Accountant Steven Throneberry, middle row foreground, discusses Park City’s audit report for the fiscal year that ended June 30 from the audience during Monday’s city commission meeting. MELINDA J. OVERSTREET / GLASGOW NEWS 1
“With that being said, there were a couple of findings in the audit this year that are different than prior year,” he said. “There’s always been one finding about segregation of duties, right? And that simply means that there’s just not enough accounting personnel to segregate duties that you would have in an ideal environment.”
He said it wasn’t necessarily Karen, referring to Karen Briggs, one of the two part-time city clerks, but rather the number of Karens, so unless they figured out a way to clone her, the segregation-of-duties finding would continue to be there, because there wasn’t enough money to hire more accounting staff, and this is very common with cities of that size.
Throneberry said it is good accounting practice to reconcile statements in a timely fashion, to allow for discovery of any misrepresentations, adding that everyone is human and even banks make mistakes sometimes.
“With some of the transitions we did note that those weren’t done in a timely fashion, but I think it is imperative to note that when those were identified and Karen became aware of those, that she did go back and reconcile those accounts,” he said.
The last piece of the findings, he said, was budget adherence, directing the attention of the commission members to a page toward the back of the 31-page audit report and noting that the city spent $63,135 more than what was in the approved budget.
He said that could have happened with the transition from one prior clerk to another one, before the current ones, that the budget just didn’t get amended at the end of the fiscal year or not amended enough, but in speaking with Mayor Larry Poteet and Briggs, he said, it is something that will kept more to the forefront with more tracking as they go along.
Throneberry then turned to the statement of net position and other specific financial tables.
Total assets at the close of that fiscal year were $2,176,218, with more than $1.8 million of that in the category of capital assets and only about $311,000 in cash and other unrestricted funds.
Total liabilities were $306,254. With those figures and deferred inflows and outflows of resources, such as for the required payments to the state pension system, calculated together, the net position was $2.2 million. In the course of that discussion, Throneberry said the city’s debt ratio was 11-1.
“A lot of banks will look at a current ratio in lending, and anywhere from 1-1 to 3-1 is good ratio, so 11-1 is in a very strong financial position. Simply – another way of saying that is you could pay your current liabilities 11 times over with what you have on hand,” he said.
Action items for the commission, all approved unanimously, included:
— Giving the mayor authority to handle personnel matters such as hiring and firing, erroneously discussed during a closed session but disclosed after the meeting by Poteet;
— First reading of an ordinance repealing the city’s current ordinance regarding the operation of golf carts in the city, which means state law – Kentucky Revised Statute 189 – becomes the default set of rules and no golf cart may be operated on state-maintained roadways, including U.S. 31-W, Ky. 255 and, of course, Interstate 65;
— First reading of an ordinance rezoning of approximately 2.5 total acres at 50 Tisdale St. from multifamily residential (R-2) to neighborhood business (NB) district, which was the recommendation of the Joint City-County Planning Commission of Barren County after a hearing on the matter, with Charlotte Vasquez as the owner-applicant;
— First reading of an ordinance accepting North Indian Mills Road – approximately 145 feet long – for city maintenance;
— Municipal order making appointments of nonelected city officials – Woody Gardner, city attorney; Ronnie Stinson, fire chief; Gary Martin, Anthony Huff and Nick Billa as assistant fire chiefs; Garland Gilliam, emergency management director; and Marcus Thurman and Anita May, deputy emergency management directors;
— A series of resolutions that designated Poteet as the city’s applicant agent, adopted a plan for continuity of government in the mayor’s absence or disability, adopted a statewide mutual aid agreement, adopted the Barren County Emergency Operations Plan and adopted the National Incident Management System;
— A resolution that declared a 1-ton Chevrolet dump truck as surplus property and used for a trade-in allowance to H & H Construction for a 10-foot dump trailer;
— A vote to accept a quote for $2,500 by Lopez Painting in Bowling Green – the lowest quote of three obtained and the others being for $4,010 and about $6,900 – for the painting of the interior walls, with any patching needed, of the Park City Senior Center, with the purchase of the paint falling to the city;
— A vote for the city to enter the cooperative program through the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet Department for Rural and Municipal Aid that allows the city to apply for receive emergency funding assistance for “unforeseen municipal emergencies;”
— A vote to accept a proposal by TNT Landscaping to do some work at the Park City veterans memorial wall for $3,000.
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