A2Politico: County Treasurer—“There Was Too Much Possibility For Fraud Or Abuse.”

by P.D. Lesko

THIS NEWSPAPER, UNLIKE  many in the United States, has a regular column that deals with the issues of hunger, homelessness and poverty in our city, state and nation. “Urban Exile” is not fluffy feel-good journalism. The column is gritty and sometimes hard to read. After all, poor and homeless people are everywhere and nowhere all at once. Local politicians go on about the importance of “downtown,” “transit,” and “development.” They’ll furrow their brows over a need to retain “young people” by developing so-called “workforce” housing which gets confused (perhaps deliberately) with “affordable housing.” “Affordable housing” gets confused (perhaps deliberately) with “low income housing.”

Mayoral candidate Christopher Taylor, on his Facebook page, makes the case for “more affordable housing.” Yet, when there was a push from citizens to open up City Hall to the homeless at night during the bouts of polar weather, Taylor wasn’t interested, and neither were mayoral candidates Sabra Briere or Stephen Kunselman.

One in four children in Michigan suffers from food insecurity, according to research by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Those are children who go hungry on a regular basis. In our county, 1 in 7 people struggle with food insecurity or hunger and almost 15 percent of county residents live in poverty, around 52,000 people. Those numbers are estimates. People don’t always apply for help; they struggle.

Front page stories in the past two issues of this newspaper have focused on analyses of Washtenaw County’s employee credit card records. Analyzing almost 14,000 credit card records is no small task, but it’s necessary to identify patterns, such as the trips to Las Vegas, total spending on lodging at Hilton hotels and the number of meals out a particular individual or county department charged to taxpayers.

The public trust is no small matter, and eating out on the public dime—particularly when many members of the taxpaying public  are poor and hungry—is an abuse of the public trust. In the analysis of county credit card charges between 2011 and 2014, not one credit card charge was made by Washtenaw County Treasurer Catherine McClary or anyone in her department.

That’s because Catherine McClary doesn’t have a county credit card, and neither do any of the dozen county staffers who work in McClary’s department. McClary is a genial woman who clearly loves her job. She’s excited that the number of foreclosures in the county has fallen. She’s equally excited that by 2015 credit cards in the U.S. will use chip technology, “just like credit cards in Europe,” explains McClary. “It will make credit card fraud much more difficult, because the chip will allow instantaneous transmission of information.”

When asked why she doesn’t have a county credit card, Catherine McClary said: “Under the previous County Administrator (Robert Guenzel) the county started issuing credit cards to anyone who had a ‘business need’ for a card. That seemed a little lax to me. There was too much possibility for abuse and/or fraud.”

McClary doesn’t mince words. “The controls weren’t tight enough under the previous County Administrator (Guenzel). We have very specific written procedures now.”

McClary and her 12.5 staffers are charged with accounting for $1 billion dollars per year—$500 million dollars that come into the county’s coffers and $500 million dollars that go out of the county’s coffers. Not a penny more and not a penny less. When County Treasurer Catherine McClary suggests financial controls might be lax, or that there might be the possibility for abuse or fraud, someone should be listening to her.

The Treasurer’s budget is approximately $1.46 million per year. She does sign off on conference attendance requests for her staff, but expects her people to learn new skills.

“We look at the conference agendas,” said McClary, “and the list of speakers, workshops, etc….We spent $3,903 on professional development for 2013.”

But is it as important for a county staffer to have a $32 buffet meal at the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas as it is to have just a bit more money to fund Meals on Wheels?

Catherine McClary argues that conferences are important, particularly the opportunities for face-to-face networking, where attendees exchange information and ideas. Maybe so, but when county services are cut (or taxes hiked) while county employees spend taxpayers’ funds on professional development, meals out, airplane tickets and shopping at Nordstrom, the balance seems off.

“I go to the Michigan County Treasurer’s conference,” said McClary. “It was in Las Vegas one year. Imagine, 83 Michigan county treasurers wandering around a casino. I spent $20 gambling. The group hasn’t been back to Vegas, however. We just weren’t comfortable with Las Vegas as a venue.”

While Washtenaw County wasn’t as hard hit as other Michigan counties by the Great Recession, it’s still a fact that hunger, poverty and homelessness plague our county. It’s still a fact that both Ann Arbor City Council and the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners have repeatedly targeted human services funding in order to make ends meet. Sometimes cuts are not made, and other times proposed cuts are “restored”—effectively freezing human services funding at a previous year’s level. Cuts happen, such as county funding cuts to the Head Start program and the Delonis Center—Ann Arbor’s downtown homeless shelter.

The county treasurer thinks it’s important that public money is used for the public good. She is not a fan of funneling public money to private development—something both city and county pols do by giving property tax dollars to Ann Arbor SPARK.

As for meals out around Ann Arbor on the taxpayer dime, Ms. McClary doesn’t partake, according to both county credit card records, as well as the county’s online checkbook.

“I wouldn’t even bother to write about it,” said McClary. “It’s nothing special.”