I’ve written that same thing for the last 30 months. The Sac City Council, unlike other boards who have tight budgets in town, refuses to publically examine the sometimes questionable spending submitted to them.
In my continuing series where I more closely examine Sac City claims, I found out that the city is buying clothes for city employees. Not coveralls and normal work gear like boots and gloves, and not in the normal way that employers buy their employees clothes by giving them, you know… a paycheck.
When moving to approve the claims, Mr. Frederick said, “I reviewed the claims this afternoon, they all looked in order.” At least the people who trust Mr. Frederick are assured. Mr. Hansen and Mr. Brenny didn’t even talk, other than to vote “yes”… and I know for sure that there are instances when council members are looking at the claims register for the first time a mere two minutes before the vote. I have them admitting it on video.
For the record, three “ticks” on the above list represent 16 separate pages of data. This cannot be reviewed in depth in a couple of minutes… certainly some of it needs explaining. I could make an entire full time website just chasing down and explaining it all.
Following are the receipts for clothes that the Sac City Council spent taxpayer money buying for one of (or more) of the office employees:
I don’t have the expense voucher for the receipt on the left yet. Feel free to call the city office yourself (712 662 7593) to find out what’s up. If you get a satisfactory answer before I do, drop me a line letting me know what you find. It may be that there is some sort of strange contract stipulation that allows for this. This employee makes 20 bucks an hour AND gets free clothes. I wonder what other back door compensation the office employees receive that we never hear about just because our City Council is either too trusting or too lazy to follow up.
The City Council could have taken the opportunity to clear this up when Mayor Powell asked them if there were any items on the claims that they wanted to discuss or to have clarified. Instead they chose to blow it off for the sake of getting through the meeting faster.
If you would like to see an example of a board willing to really dig into the financials to find out what’s going on with the money they are approving, check out a Kid’s World Executive board meeting, or even an Anti-East Sac County School Board of Directors meeting. Granted, they have different motives, (Kid’s World is concerned and wants to help the director figure out how to get through the looming financial disaster, as opposed to the AESC board which just wants to play “gotcha” ), but in the end, the financials are picked through with a fine tooth comb.
Employees under the governance of those two boards know they are being watched. How long would the director of Kid’s World get away with charging hundreds of dollars, (per month!) for mileage? How long would she be able to spend thousands of dollars, (per month!) attending conferences without telling her board what she did or what she learned from them?
There are a couple of pretty serious issues either upcoming or being ignored by the Sac City Council.
1. The council will not address the abuse of power issue alleged by Chris Batz. It seems fairly obvious that a decision was made in private, probably in illegal meetings held via email, or some similar manner that they would not conduct an investigation themselves, nor advise law enforcement with respect to what they know. It certainly is curious that Ms. Batz resigned one month after she spoke of this topic during a public meeting to the Sac Community Center Executive Board of Directors.
2. Will there be raises for the city employees in a year when everybody else is cutting? Who will be shocked if this happens?
3. Attendance is dismal. Has Brian Muska (sort of) quit the council again? Does anyone even remember what Jim Johnston, (whom didn’t show up for the first council meeting after his re-election,) looks like?
4. With the exception of Jim Johnston, the city council members are generally attending the boards on which they are supposed to sit… The problem is we never get an update about what’s really going on at these boards. All we hear from them is a quick one or two sentence summary that typically covers projects. In some cases, this is appropriate, but in some cases it is not adequate. A committee report is a report, not the casual chat that our city council engages in with a wink and a nudge.
Perhaps the reality is that somebody finally needs to be brave enough to say it like it is and propose two-year terms, or term limits. Sure, it’d be a pain, but that seems to be about how long it takes for the typical Sac City Council member to become... maybe corrupted is too strong a term… let’s say they become complacent. Let’s say that it seems to become easier for them to just go with the flow and not make waves. New blood every two years would solve this problem. Barring that, term limits would be the next best solution.
Whatever happens, some step needs to be taken until we get City Council members who take their elected positions seriously.
As it is, control of the city council in the off years is in the hands of the city employees and their 182 extended family members and friends. It’s heartening to see that grip on our throats loosened a little in this last election. It’s a real testament to Mr. Frohardt’s popularity that he was able to overcome the city employee voting bloc and steal enough votes away from the incumbent that was a guaranteed yes vote for whatever raises the employees want every year.
Councilmen Muska, Brenny, and Frederick seem to be more honest then the people that preceded them, and if it’s true that they will not be running again it’s scary to contemplate which of Shirley Phillip’s dipsh*t puppets are going to run to replace them and what they’ll do with our tax money.
It would be nice if in the next two years before they leave the City Council, these three focused on establishing a regular public accounting of all money spent… like the school does, like Kid’s world does, Like the Fair Board, like the Community Center, etc, etc.
It’s their job, and they are not doing it.
"Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." George Orwell, Animal Farm
