Scrutiny clouds transparency

Ever since Sarasota county commissioners voted to amend an ordinance that shifted Siesta Village upkeep spending from the Siesta Key Maintenance Corp. to Sarasota County, SKVMC Chairman Mark Smith said navigating county accounting has been a struggle.

“We don’t how much money (Sarasota County) spent in the district,” Smith said in an Aug. 1 phone interview. “We have a vested interest in seeing maintenance done correctly and how the county is spending time and resources in the village.”

The Sarasota County Tax Collector assessed Smith and other property owners in the Siesta Key Village Improvement District a total of about $210,000 for upkeep of the improvement district this year, a number that is calculated to encompass the cost of services such as landscaping, pressure washing and trash pickup.

The contract for a maintenance firm to do the bulk of Village upkeep is $97,417 annually, which will commence once Sarasota County commissioners approve the contract this fall.

But, according to the rough expenditure estimates obtained by Smith and the Pelican Press, the numbers don’t exactly add up. Ryan Montague, a staff member with Sarasota County Traffic Engineering and Operations, was able to narrow down some of the improvement district’s 2012 expenditures during a phone interview. He used the county’s new website, which lists spending projects under the tab labeled “financial transparency.”

Sarasota County paid two contractors, Wilhelm Brothers Inc. and Superior Cleaning Inc., a total of $42,598,37 as of Aug. 1. This could be greater, depending on how much staff time and resources was used thus far, but a formal public records request was not acknowledged as of Aug. 8. In terms of average monthly collections, that means the county collected from Village property owners about $122,500 from the first seven months of 2012.

The county is recovering from a procurement scandal, and is in the midst of a lawsuit with Village restaurant and bar owner Chris Brown over tax assessments, so staff has blamed the lack of records on an increase in accounting scrutiny. During a Feb. 21 public hearing, Montague defended the amount assessed, and said it can take several months to enter a procurement receipt into the system properly.

“How long does it take for the county to figure out how much money they spent in the Village,” Smith asked. “You would think as soon as a purchase order was set up and paid (the county) would know what they spent.”

Getting current receipts in a timely fashion would help prepare stakeholders to ask for a reassessment, which could require a lawsuit. “Not that I don’t trust government,” Smith said. “But, we have to keep track of (expenditures), because if indeed the district was overassessed, then (the millage) should be readjusted.”

Smith was irked when Sarasota County staff asked for receipts from 2008, in order to get nearly $3,000 owed to the SKVMC for establishment and accounting costs. County commissioners approved that reimbursement in April, but staff told Smith there were inconsistencies that must be investigated.

The accounting quagmire prompted Smith to lobby for quarterly meetings with county staff to get debits and credits in sync, but he hasn’t received an answer on that possibility. And the hours and resources aren’t included in Sarasota County’s 2012 fiscal year budget, according to tentative financial documents.

“I’ve given the county everything they’ve asked for and they keep asking for something else,” Smith said. The last check requested was for $300, he said during an Aug. 7 meeting of the Siesta Key Village Association. “We will get our money eventually,” he said. “I believe there’s only a finite number of ‘something elses’ they can ask for — that’s just a theory.”