Hand, Cookie Jar, Some Catching Required...

Came across this lovely little story of a city manager getting caught red-handed at budgetary chicanery:

Lynn Overspends Snow Budget In Mild Winter

LYNN (CBS) – With such a mild winter, no one expected the city of Lynn to blow through its entire ice and snow removal budget.

But the Department of Public Works (DPW) ended up overspending by $138,165. The grand total ostensibly spent on snow removal for this winter wound up being $923,327. That’s well above the $785,162 the city had allocated.

What floors me is that they're not even going to do an investigation. The city financial manager claims that this is "in the past" - the same argument my children make when I remind them that they are being punished for something that happened earlier in the week. It doesn't work for a 9 year old grounded for hitting her brother; the town manager for Lynn, MA thinks it works when a city manager misappropriates half a million dollars. Nice. Your tax dollars at work, folks.

See, here's the thing. The snow and ice removal budget is kept separate from the normal operating budget for a simple and obvious reason: it changes from year to year, often dramatically. Two years ago we had a nasty, cold, brutish winter with many snowstorms and lots of ice. The budget for that year must have been gigantic for a large city like Lynn. Follow that up with the *extremely* mild winter of this past year, and it's likely that the city was sitting on a windfall of epic proportions.

And then for it to just disappear to salaries? Where did the salary money go? And, more importantly, why is no one asking these questions. The city CFO states:

“I’m not sure that we’ll conduct an investigation,” Fortucci continued. “I can’t look back; I’ve got to look forward. Again, corrective action [was] taken and we will move forward with this and make sure that the practice will not happen again.”

So, basically, that cool half-mil is gone, never to be seen again, and you don't care what happened to it? I hope the next time the city of Lynn faces a budget shortfall the folks there remind City Financial Officer Fortucci that the old budget was in the past, man, and that they'll just have to move forward. Oh, and sorry about your salary, but that's in the past too. I like how he just pastes over the DPW manager abruptly quitting, oh, he's a good guy, he did everything right. NO. No he didn't, not if he was using snow & ice removal budget for salaries.

Something's rotten in the city of Lynn - well, moreso than usual.

That is all.