Friday, February 22, 2013

Richardson’s Slush Funds


 

Towards the back of the CAFR there is a section that identifies some special funds, very special for the city admin.

The names of these funds are Special Police Fund, State Grants, Federal Grant, Municipal Court Security, Traffic Safety Fund, Technology Fund, Judicial Efficiency Fund, Technology Fund, Hotel/Motel Fund, PEG Fund, TIF Funds, RIC Fund, and then, the piggy bank funds. Those piggy bank funds seem to have , Wireless 911 Fund, and the Drainage Funds.

Most of these funds have a special purpose that does not include raids or fund sweeps.

The most interesting funds on pages 76 and 77 of the CAFR are the Hotel/Motel, Wireless 911 and Drainage Funds.

The Hotel/Motel Fund took in about $5.4 million. Of that amount about $4.5 million was expensed out for whatever.  The interesting part of that is that $655,000 (12.11%) was sent out for a G&A transfer. That seems to be a lot of money for some bean counting. But that is not the worst of it.

Without much of an explanation $450,000 (85.28%) was transfer out of the wireless 911 fee. Expenses in that fund amounted to a minimum of total income; only $33,476 (6.34%) was spent. So it seems that only 6% of the fund was put to its purpose and 85% was swept to the General Fund to support other spending.

Last year the city said it was entitled to put a storm water drainage fee on the water bill. Never ones to pass up the opportunity to gather more money to rat hole and spend on who knows what, they collected $1.8 million dollars in these fees. As for expenses, after raking in all that money they spent $61,158 (3.43%) on something. The big winner here once again was the General Fund which got a transfer out from the Drainage Fund of $910,000 which represents 64.56% of the total income of that fund.

Over the years over $100 million has been transfer out of proprietary funds, funds set up to do specific things. Apparently the city management believes that those propriety funds are they to support not only their named functions, but also support the spend-happy city officials.

My bet is that if you ask any of the council about these G&A transfer or Transfer Out they would not be able to tell you what the many actually went for, other than administrative fees. If you ask for the documents to support the fees, you will probably just be told it is just the way we do things here.

The city appears to be having a cash flow problem and seems to have the need to raid the funds for fund sweeps for the general fund, to keep it going.

 

3 comments:

  1. Only a couple of years ago Bill Keffler lied to the community during a Council meeting by saying the CAFR at the time contained everything. It didn't, and we knew it.

    It seems they learned that they have to disclose all these funds, not just the ones they want to.

    The challenge now is to get them to be forthcoming in all the details such that the citizens of Richardson can determine whether or not they agree with what is being done with ALL the public resources.

    When the citizens are fully informed and engaged in the process, that'll be the day to celebrate. Until then, spitting in the wind will yield the same result.

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  2. Bill Keffler lied and said the BUDGET filed would contained all the disclosures, but they were only presenting the major five funds. That is a violation of the Charter and local government code.

    All of the sweeps are in violation of the charter also because there is no direct expenditure on the other side. And these sweeps are growing in nature year over year.

    But for some reason the Council deems this as unimportant. Just because they have gotten away with it does not mean it is less inappropriate.

    Why else would the big bucks be spent on marketing?

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  3. Marketing? Ha! More like political consulting with the most shady operators in the territory. They are only doing damage control and pre-emptive strikes to draw attention away from their plot. Wise up and move out of town. It's your only hope to get away from these creeps.

    ReplyDelete