And
cleaning up the CCA’s mess
By
Will Collette
 |
| The CCA's approach: deny, deny, deny |
Our
new Town Council has been
duly sworn in and faces the major challenge of cleaning up Charlestown’s money messes.
A lot has changed since the $3 million “oopsie” was revealed (the misplacement of $3 million and subsequent
budget problems that created) and a newly revealed mess regarding the way town management has been calculating the payroll.
We
have a new Council majority and only one surviving CCA Council member – retired
attorney Susan Cooper who by interesting coincidence was the Council “liaison” to
the Budget Commission where she was supposed to perform oversight for the
Council.
Unfortunately,
the Budget Commission is still headed by Dick Sartor, a former Charlestown Town
Administrator, whose main talent appears to be keeping a lid on embarrassing problems. We still have Town Administrator Mark
Stankiewicz who has also played a central role in both the “Oopsie” and the new
staff payroll controversy.
The
Charlestown Citizens Alliance (CCA) and their faithful manservant Stankiewicz hate it when anyone challenges the way they
handled Charlestown taxpayers’ money.
They
address such challenges in two ways. First, they talk about Charlestown’s low
tax rate while skimming over the fact that actual Charlestown tax collections
have increased every year they held power largely due to the town’s Über-gentrification that has driven up tax assessments.
Second,
they attack the challenger, particularly Steve Hoff whose critiques have
frequently been published in Progressive Charlestown. For some prime examples
of Steve’s detailed professional analytical work, click HERE and HERE and HERE.
One such
attack was a ghost-written November 27 letter to the Westerly Sun that ran over
the name of ex-CCA Town Council member Bonnita Van Slyke. She was listed as a
Charlestown resident even though she closed on the sale of her waterfront
Arnolda estate for $2 million on November 16.
Steve
Hoff had testified at the Town Council meeting on November 14 before Van Slyke
left for parts unknown. He
had found an error in the way Charlestown management had been paying its
salaried employees caused by using the wrong number
of days in a fiscal year to calculate their pay checks. This
resulted in overpayments to employees over a multi-year period.
The
Town uses 260 days as its standard number of workdays per year. However, that
number is true in only 30%
of the years while in 70%
of the years, the number of workdays is 261 or 262 days.
Charlestown
pays staff every two weeks using an incorrect pay rate. Because they use the
wrong number of days in most years, salaried employees get paid for one or two
days more than allowed under their Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBA) or
contracts.
This cost is not included in the voter approved budgets. As the Van
Slyke letter adamantly insists, “staff get paid for the hours they work” as they
should, I might add, but in Charlestown, they get a little extra.
When
you pay more than what is budgeted, it not only affects wages, but all costs
related to wages such as longevity,
and the employer contributions to Social Security
FICA, Medicare, the town pension,
unemployment insurance and temporary disability insurance.
That adds thousands
more in taxpayers’ costs from this latest uncovered “oopsie” which is estimated
to be at least $200,000 in overpayments to employees.
This
mismatch
in days budgeted
becomes a budget liability that accumulates and eventually must be addressed by
an “adjustment” to correct the error, as was done earlier this year. It’s a
sloppy practice. I will admit doing this when I discover my checkbook balance
is out of whack and I can’t find the error. I do an “adjustment” and it’s all
better. Or at least I can pretend it is.
When
I do it, it’s just a harmless entry on Quicken. When the town does it, it’s
actual money
out of the taxpayers’ pockets.
The
solution to this problem is ridiculously easy. The easiest, not
to mention most logical,
would be to simply count the actual number of workdays before
the start of each fiscal year and divide the employee’s salary by the actual number of
workdays.
The
other simple solution would be to switch from paying every two weeks to paying
twice a month, like the 1st and
the 15th and divide
the employee’s salary by the 24 payroll checks issued annually.
It’s
not rocket science, nor does it require some onerous effort. To do a payroll
properly, you must constantly adjust for changes in salary, tax rates,
insurance co-pays, dependents, etc. Why not simply annually adjust the number
of workdays to reflect reality and stop overpaying Town employees with our tax dollars?
Either
method would make it easy to ensure each salaried worker gets exactly what
their contract or collective bargaining agreement requires.
As a
trade unionist, I staunchly support workers’ right to fair pay. I oppose making
town staff pay back roughly $200,000 in overpayments caused by sloppy town
financial management at the highest level. They did not contribute to
causing this error and, in most cases, probably never noticed it.
But
going forward, I hope the new Council majority will insist on better
management.
The
CCA runs on the principle that it never makes mistakes. Stankiewicz, good
servant that he is, is also covered by the “never admit, never apologize,
always attack” policy. Thus, they never take responsibility, nor do they
ever promise to do better.
Stankiewicz publicly attacked Steve Hoff after his testimony, not on the merits of his comments,
but by claiming
that (a) Steve is not a CPA and (b) none of Steve’s complaints, either about
financial management or town open records policy, had any merit.
Untrue
on all counts. In fact, if Stankiewicz had spent ten minutes on-line, he would
have found one of Steve’s CPA credentials at Connecticut’s
licensing database.
His
other CPA credential is with the State of New Hampshire Certificate #1918
issued on November 19, 1990. He also has a Master’s Degree in Business
Administration with a major in Finance awarded by the University of Washington
in Seattle on March 18, 1977.
Here's the Connecticut license:
You
can also click
HERE
to see Steve’s MBA diploma and
HERE
to see his New Hampshire credentials.
Steve
retired and moved to Charlestown in 2008. Neither his retirement nor move to
town changes the fact that he is a CPA.
As
for Stankiewicz’s charge that all of Steve’s complaints to the state have
fallen on deaf ears, check out this letter from the state’s Auditor General Dennis Hoyle (CLICK
HERE).
Auditor
General Hoyle leads off by acknowledging that Charlestown “misclassified” $3
million and said he had already reached out to the town telling them to correct
it. He also agreed to several additional concerns Steve raised.
In
every appeal to the state Attorney General over Stankiewicz’s draconian records
access policy, the AG’s Open Government officer has chastised Charlestown for
looking for loopholes to prevent public access rather than following a more
open policy. On several specific issues, the AG’s office ruled in Steve’s
favor.
To
get additional information, Steve has paid the town $330.99 to get such key public
records as the town’s General Ledgers. That paid off when he found the payroll
irregularity that has gotten so deeply under the CCA’s and Stankiewicz's skin. Click HERE
to see the General Ledger for fiscal year 2021.
I
understand the appeal in attacking the messenger when you don’t like the
message. After all, I pointed out at the start of this article that Bonnie’s
CCA rebuttal letter was printed 11 days after Van Slyke sold her Charlestown
house.
But
it’s more important to focus
on the substance and back up your arguments with evidence.
