A.G. Gancarski
The Jacksonville City Council Finance Committee mulled on Monday an agenda including bills on the Bob Hayes Track Meet, JEA Agreement, increased money for JSO, and stolen property.
• 2015-764, the JEA Agreement ordinance, passed Finance 6-0. Included: a floor amendment from Lori Boyer.
One such sticking point: revenue from future utility businesses in which JEA may participate. New charter language waives that from the five-year agreement. Boyer was fine with not including them in the current agreement, but when it comes time to renegotiate, she wanted the city to have a chance to get a cut.
Melissa Dykes, JEA CFO, said, “Nothing in the agreement says that Council doesn’t get paid. It just says that bondholders get paid first.”
Boyer’s response: “I just want to make sure that at the end of the five years, there isn’t a gotcha.”
Dykes contended that the clause is “fundamental” to reassuring the bond market. Boyer countered that the issue was one of disclosure.
• 2016-103, allowing the deletion of 1,346 items with a total book value of $94,266 from the city’s inventory of 28,000 items, almost passed unanimously without discussion. Then Aaron Bowman spoke up, noting that some of these items go back “15 or 20 years, probably things we don’t even want anymore.” Still, he wanted to know what was being done to remove the threat of loss.
“The administration in the past did not take its responsibility, and so it worked down that no one is taking responsibility … especially over the last five years,” said CFO Mike Weinstein.
Improved inventory control tagging and dedicated staff will be devoted to remedying the problem, Weinstein said.
A certain amount of such assets may be “fully depreciated” yet still have useful life, said Bill Gulliford, such as the handsome wood tables in the Council conference rooms.
“I see things going back to ’95 that aren’t being used anymore,” he said. “There are copy machines on here that are 16 years old … it would be prudent to go back and look at assets past a certain age.”
Kevin Stork noted that the Sheriff’s Office is still using a “40-year-old mixer.”
John Crescimbeni noted that, long before the “previous administration,” the city’s inventory process could be described as “sloppy,” citing a 2011 meeting with Stork when he worked for the John Peyton administration.
“We need to modernize. Inventory should be what’s happening in retail stores,” and an RFID-driven inventory control system would, finally, revisit the issue, but “only if it becomes a priority,” said Crescimbeni.
“It’s not going to get fixed until it becomes a priority, my gut feeling is this stuff’s been surpluses, but it hasn’t been reported properly,” Crescimbeni said of this “pretty messed up system.”
The original “real cost” of this equipment, noted Aaron Bowman, is closer to $4.3 million, a truer indicator of replacement costs.
• Finance unanimously approved the grant for the Bob Hayes Invitational Track Meet, but not without some discussion of the meet’s less-than-detailed paperwork and attention to budgetary detail. This bill will clarify city forgiveness of 2014-15 expenditures, correct the date of the meet to March 19, and remove the organization from the dreaded noncompliance list. Bill sponsor Reggie Brown said, “We should not be in this hour doing it,” and failure to pass this would be “an embarrassment to the city.”
“The process needs to be fixed,” Brown said, and if the bill weren’t to pass, the event would likely be cancelled.
One issue that Council VP Lori Boyer complained had a lack of detail was in the events’ “broad expenditure budget categories.” One example she cited was a broadly allocated $62,400 that she said given the lack of detail “could be used to take food-and-beverage staff to a dinner at Ruth’s Chris.”
Brown then threw Council Auditor Kirk Sherman under the bus, saying, “This is an embarrassment,” and “This was not what I came out of the meeting” thinking was in play.
Boyer looked to resolve it with an amendment, using the FY 14-15 budget as a jumping-off point, allowing for flexibility with a range of $2,500 or 20 percent more over the previous year’s number.
• Finance also OK’d moving $500,000 from Jax Journey to JSO overtime costs to fight crime in “hot spots,” a move previewed by Lenny Curry in the Jax Journey meeting.
• Addressed at the end of the meeting were ways to close the loophole in retirement benefits, regarding DB to DC conversions, which worked to the benefit of Ronnie Belton and others hired since 10/1/2009.
City Treasurer Joey Greive said, “We need to fix this and this is a process that has been flawed for a while now.” Previously, the position was that a fix was contingent on collective bargaining.
“The list is 50,60 people long,” with four of the people, including Belton, taking advantage of this loophole to convert funds even though the five-year employment requirement hadn’t been satisfied.
There will be a “moratorium” on such conversions, pending a meeting of the pension board workshop on March 17 to “finally resolve this … through the adoption of a new board rule” without “any new legislation at this time.”
Gulliford’s concern is the rule could be changed by the board, and his bias is toward “codifying things.”
Matt Schellenberg would like said codification also via legislation, to make it “clear from this point on.”
