Look what happens when you have a fox guarding the hen house. No, you don't have wholesale slaughter of the chicks, but you do have peeps much more conscientious of what they are doing. What am I talking about?
A review of our financials as of June 30, 2007 shows that we have $5,039,870.01 more than we did as of June 30, 2006. Five million dollars more. Now, granted, half of that is due to a windfall estate tax receipt that we received in February of this year, an unexpected but welcome deposit into the township's treasury. But what about the rest? Good fiscal policy, ardent review of expenditures, conscientious pursuit of revenue (without raising taxes), and employees who are beginning to realize that the trustees (well, at least two of us), do not view the taxpayers as bottomless pits of money.
The first step in putting our financial matters in orders was hiring someone who knew what a balance sheet and budgets were, someone who not only knew how to read reports but how to develop reports that were informative and useful. Devon Klofta was hired in fall of 2006 as our Director of Accounting and Budgeting.
Now we have monthly reports that show us how much we have spent, how much we had expected to spend, how much more we plan to spend, trending information, and - (drum roll please) - a bank reconciliation, to show us how much cash we have in the bank. Last fall, when we had state auditors in the office performing our biennial audit, I refused to approve monthly financial information as it was provided to the trustees by the Fiscal Officer after the state auditor told me that the cash we reported on our balance sheet did not match the cash we had in the bank. I'm not sure how that happened, but I do know we have fixed that problem and now we know exactly how much cash we have, and I'm happy to say that we have $5 million more than we did last year.
