At the town board work session Monday evening, when town administrators presented reports, Town Supervisor Robert Leary introduced the new Director of Finance & Budget Nicholas Swanson and called on him to speak on the finances in the town.

Swanson presented an update on his first month’s findings. He spoke on working on some 2023 finance issues that had occurred and which would be addressed at the NYS Comptroller’s audit. Swanson declared he was actively looking into financial issues from August of 2023 when ‘things started to fall off’ – “especially the last three months of the year when things really fell off.”

Swanson added that the department was almost caught up and that the town was in a strong place. However, he wanted the board to know that things were not handled in the best interest of the town in 2023.

Supervisor Leary declared that the town was actually looking back at invoices from June of 2023. “Contracts were not honored; bills weren’t being paid. We are going to get hit hard by the New York State audit from what the office is telling us.”

Leary said the final audit has not been received, but changes have already been made by the finance department. “Basically, we have a lot of people involved in the approval of every single invoice that goes through,” declared Leary. “That was not happening before. We have made changes to ensure that we are in compliance with what is required. We will be in a much stronger position than before.”

Leary declared a lot of lines went unfilled, including the budget, yet the money was there. A lot of stuff was not loaded into the Tyler-Munis system. Financially the town should be ok moving forward. The town has to go through another town audit with Drescher-Malecki and they are going to find the same errors.

Comment

On January 3, 2023, then Supervisor Ronald Ruffino sponsored a resolution recommending the hiring of Lumsden & McCormick, LLP to fill vacancies in one or more Accounting, HR, Director of Payroll and Director of Finance positions – vacancies due to resignations in the Supervisor’s office.

Ruffino advocated for the hiring explaining it would be a cost savings move and that the town would be serviced by multiple ‘experts,’ someone always available. Ruffino, councilmembers Burkard, Dickman and Mazur voted yes. Council member Leary conditioned his ‘yes’ vote based on town employees needing to get paid – strongly advocating that the vacancies should be filled with competent individuals.

It didn’t take long for grumblings to occur that errors and omissions were taking place. The budget process was a mess and required numerous ‘adjustments.’ It’s good to hear the mess is being cleaned up, errors are being corrected, bills are being paid and the system is returning to its normal operation. Six weeks on the job and Swanson is cleaning up the mess made by so-called ‘experts.’

I never did hear whether Drescher-Malecki gave a ‘clean opinion’ when performing their 2023 town audit. Their findings this year should be interesting.