Due diligence rather than mistrust of staff led to split vote on County bills

That a change of perspective has come to the Warren County Board of Supervisors was reflected in the second meeting with the three-person board majority seated with the new year in the fiscal, among other saddles, on Tuesday, January 21st.

After a lengthy discussion of what would normally be considered routine business – approval of payment of accounts due, the board narrowly agreed to pay its bills on schedule when Board Chairman and new Shenandoah District Supervisor Walter Mabe voted with the two carryover supervisors, Archie Fox and Tony Carter, to approve those payments.

“I’m not one to not pay a bill, but I try every day to see that every bill we pay is legitimate … and that the County is run efficiently,” Mabe said in prefacing his vote to pay vendors for services performed, the Town for utility bills due, and myriad vehicle maintenance, staff and other expenditures listed in the 87-page accounts payable document. Photos and video by Mark Williams, Royal Examiner.

However, his fellow newly-elected supervisors, Vice-Chair Cheryl Cullers and Delores Oates voted against keeping the County current on its bills without more time to verify that they were all legitimate expenses.

Vice-Chair Cheryl Cullers and Delores Oates voted against keeping the County current on its bills without more time to verify that they were all legitimate expenses.

After Cullers said she had red-lined a number of items for explanation by staff, Carter suggested she forward those questions to administrative staff prior to meetings to avoid such a last-minute reluctance to pay monthly, or in this case two months, of bills coming due. Cullers responded that there had been two holidays creating a 4-day weekend after she picked the agenda packet up late Thursday afternoon, minimizing the time staff was in office to respond to questions.

County Administrator Doug Stanley said he, the finance director or department heads from whom the billing documents are generated, could generally answer any questions board members might have on accounts payable.

The trio of newly elected supervisors all campaigned on reform of business as usual platforms in reaction to public outrage over the $21.3 million Economic Development Authority (EDA) scandal and alleged embezzlements. And with a number of public, not to mention not-quite-private, comments offered Tuesday night illustrating suspicions that some County administrative staff, as well as past County and EDA board members may have been negligent, if not worse in allowing the EDA financial scandal to develop over several years, we wondered if distrust of staff led to Cullers and Oates votes against approving the accounts payable agenda item Tuesday.

Reached the following day, they said no. In fact, Cullers and Oates both said they were not initially aware a vote against approval that night would delay scheduled payments being made the following day.

“We’re on a learning curve and with the long weekend I did my due diligence going over the payments line by line,” Cullers said, adding, “It’s not that I was suspicious, it was I didn’t understand certain line items. And when I campaigned, I said I wasn’t going to be a bobble-head in approving things if I did not understand them. I don’t want to hold up anybody’s check. I didn’t campaign to be elected to give a negative impression of Warren County. And I don’t want anybody to think I thought anybody on our staff did anything wrong.”

Oates concurred.

“I didn’t want to rubber stamp something without scrutinizing it. It was not really a distrust. It’s our responsibility to understand where the money is going. We owe it to the taxpayers to make our government more transparent and accountable,” the North River District supervisor said.

Stanley later explained to Royal Examiner that January is the one time each year where the board gets accounts due payable in two months, December when there is only one board meeting due to the holidays, and January. Stanley gave us monthly totals for December and January that were elusive among the 47 and 45 pages of bills, respectively. Those totals were $2,928,773.92 for December and $2,719,279.46 for January.

So, if some of their constituents may be prone to as yet-unsubstantiated theories of public official collusion with a “good, ole boy” network at an as-yet-undiscovered back end of the EDA financial scandal, Oates and Cullers prefer to see their questions and care as simple due diligence in the expenditure of taxpayer money in jobs they are still adjusting to. And it is a first month adjustment period during which they were exposed to their initial Accounts Payable agenda item at a two-month total of over $5.6 million.

Watch the discussion on this exclusive Royal Examiner video: