Forget about faulty furnaces and fluoride;
Go to a selectmen meeting and ask where the Town is with regards to their fiscal year 2015 financial books. You know, the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2015. Ask the selectmen, anyone of them if the cash book has been reconciled for FY 2015 or FY 2016. That is the job of the Town Treasurer. Ask where the financial team is with regards to the Municipal Calendar in regards to finance and reports to the DOR. You may not like the answers you get, if any. At this weeks Advisory Board meeting, it was decided to ask the Town Administrator for clarification on some Town employees pay and mistakes with them and how would it be corrected and more importantly, where would or where did the funds come from. In the budget to actual report from the Town Accountant, it was noted that the CMMT line item of $500.00 had been used and it was used to cover training expenses. The law is pretty clear on what that designation is for, it is to give a small financial award or stipend for an individual being trained and receiving and maintaining a form of professionalism in their field. I believe any training expense should come out of that department's expense line item or the Town should have a separate line item expense for training. Using a designation that is suppose to be for one thing yet is used for something else is wrong. It is not the amount of money, it is credibility and what an audit may reference with regards to that.
I hope when December gets here, shortly, that we as a Town do not find that things are indeed not fine in financial land and that we have not been mislead.
On a good note, I am happy to say that it looks like Stephen Hemman is doing a very good job trying to be fair and to ensure that all information on the proposed elementary school is going to get out there. You as a resident need to attend at least one of the scheduled forums to hear this information. They are trying to be ready for the many questions so it is important to attend. It is important to pay attention and to look at both sides as well as find out what is covered and what is not in regards to MSBA. Most important is to attend a selectmen meeting and ask the financial questions then write down their answers and wait for December. If the tax rate is not set on time, you will know you got a snow job. That is my opinion.
Jeff Bennett
Getting a grip on town finances is an important task as is warning its residents that there is a poison in their water supply. On September 10 2001 Donald Rumsfeld notified the press that 2.3 Trillion dollars was missing from the Pentagon budget this was to increase to 8.5 Trillion. Templeton is not the only ones with budgetary difficulties.
ReplyDeleteREPORTER: The latest scandal to hit Washington comes from a report revealing the Pentagon “misplaced” $8.5 trillion. Military leaders have also been found ordering subordinates to doctor books to hide the missing money. This is the conclusion of a special report by Reuters.
One former Pentagon employee, Linda Woodford, said she spent 15 years there falsifying financial records. Woodford had a job checking Navy accounting records against figures supplied by the Treasury Department. She said money was missing from the report every month.
(SOURCE: $8.5 Trillion Missing From Pentagon Budget)
GAYANE CHICHAKYAN: National security expert Steve Miles is here with me to help us crunch these numbers. $8.5 trillion unaccounted for?
STEPHEN MILES: That’s a lot of money. This is the kind of thing that you would think would bring Capitol Hill to a screeching halt. There’d be hearings almost every day. You’d have various committees looking into it. None of that. It just leads to massive waste and there can be all sorts of fraud that you don’t know about.
Just one example, when the Inspector General looked at Iraq — which was a lot of money, but in the grand scheme just a portion of the money the U.S. spent — what they found was about $50 billion of the money the U.S. spent there was wasted and about $6 billion was completely lost. They had no idea where it went, it was completely unaccounted for. Put that in perspective. That’s about the amount of money that other countries would spend on their defense, total. And that’s just the loose pocket change that we lost in the couch.
Where is the accountability at the Federal level?
It is important that the people in the Town of Templeton feel that they can have faith in their town government. That feeling has been missing, and that is not a good thing. Having mostly every department under one roof, will help in the day to day operation of business. Living within our budget is the most important thing the town can do, and as a member of the Advisory Board this is something I will do my best to make sure it happens. I have a good feeling about the Advisory Board members we have this year. I feel we are on the same page, and will do our best to keep the Town on the rails. We need to go forward, but we can not forget how we got in the position of near bankruptcy. Trust me when I say I will do my best to never let the town be put in that position again, and I am sure the rest of the board feels the same way. Bev.
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