Elephant Butte audit findings are bad, but financial position improved

by Kathleen Sloan | April 17, 2020
4 min read
​Unlike the City of Truth or Consequences’ yearly audit, the City of Elephant Butte’s was a deep-dive, the auditing firm handing out findings left and right for fiscal year ending June 30, 2019, and as a result the City has righted or is righting its practices. 

Ashley Tierney of Beasley Mitchell & Company gave the straight scoop to City Council in her report on the audit, the second year the firm has looked at the city’s books. 

The meeting was broadcast over radio station KCHS, Wednesday, April 15. 

First Tierney went over the financial statements, which were encouraging. The City’s net position improved by over $400,000 from last year, ending with nearly $19.6-million assets over liabilities. 

But Tierney noted most of the City’s assets are “fixed,” such as buildings, pipes in the ground and equipment, totaling $17.5 million. 

Yet the City has “no process in place for movable objects being inventoried from one year to the next,” Tierney said. There were “discrepancies,” she said, therefore the auditing firm gave a “qualified opinion” on the audit, which means “We do hold some reservations on the fair presentation of the financial statements.” An “unmodified” opinion is better, she said. 

“Working capital,” or current assets over current liabilities were “greatly improved,” Tierney said. The city had six times the assets over liabilities or over $2.4 million in current assets versus a little over $391,000 in current liabilities by June 30, 2019. The year before the city had only about three and a half times current assets over current liabilities. 

Tierney said the City gets half of its revenue from service charges from the water and wastewater departments as well as from the Sierra del Rio Golf Course. About 14 percent of its revenue comes from capital and operating grants, while the remaining 36 percent comes from taxes and state-shared revenue. 

Most of the City’s expense comes from Sierra del Rio Golf Course, which Tierney said is “typical” when newly taking over a business. The golf course lost about $377,000 in fiscal-year 2018-19, with the city subsidizing it by about $354,000. 

Every one of the 11 audit findings were repeated and modified from fiscal-year 2017-18, Tierney said. The prior fiscal-year audit was turned in so late it almost ran into the 2018-19 audit, which was turned in on time, so the City didn’t have enough time to correct problems from the prior year. 

Tierney said most of the findings have been resolved at this point, but her company was compelled to give them, following auditing standards. 

The first audit finding has the very serious “material weakness” rating. It states the City has “no procedures in place to properly maintain a capital-asset listing.” A material weakness means the value of the assets cannot be verified and therefore some may be missing or over- or under-valued. 

The second audit finding is still serious, but less so, rated “significant deficiency.” In 18 out of 25 checks examined, “purchase orders were missing or the purchase order was dated after the expense was incurred and the required authorization signatures were omitted.”

The third audit finding was also a significant deficiency. Three out of seven journal entries tested lacked proper approval. 

The fourth audit finding was a significant deficiency. One out of five cash drawers in the test group was off by $4. 

The fifth audit finding was a significant deficiency. Documentation matching a per diem payment of $5 couldn’t be found and one for $44 was paid without authorization. 

The sixth audit finding was a significant deficiency. The general-ledger-cash figure didn’t match the Department of Finance and Administration’s cash figure at the end of the year. The general ledger stated cash was at $2.5 million compared to DFA’s $1.87 million. 

The seventh audit finding was “other non-compliance.” The City broke the law in other words. It cannot expend money that exceeds the budget. It exceeded what was budgeted for Sierra del Rio by nearly $175,000, for general government by $246,000, for the fire department by over $12,000, for capital projects by over $217,000, for corrections by over $4,000, for the wastewater department by over $2,000. The total over-budget figure was about $660,000. 

The eighth audit finding was a significant deficiency. Bank reconciliations were not done in a timely manner. 

The ninth audit finding was the very serious material weakness. The City had no inventory procedures in place, such as for inventorying food items at Sierra del Rio. 

The tenth audit finding was a significant deficiency. One out of six employee files had no pay-rate-change report. Six out of six employee files had no job description or annual evaluation. 

The eleventh audit finding was a significant deficiency. The City had no procurement officer for 10 of the 12 months. 

Tierney ended the report by stating the City should have written policies and procedures, which would aid them in doing things properly and consistently, noting the large turnover it suffered in the last two years. City Manager Vicki Ballinger agreed and said she has started the work. 

Mayor Pro-Tem Kim Skinner asked that the board be kept informed on how written-policy work is proceeding. 

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Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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