What Goes Around, Is Coming Around - Part II

I have been waiting for The Star Group and the Cleburne Times-Review to publish a story about the audit of Johnson County financials. I have made phone calls for the last two weeks inquiring as to when those stories would be published. I have been told by Cleburne Times-Review it should be this week. The Star has made no such commitment. We'll see. This is basically the letter to the editor for The Star Group. The yellow highlighted section was added for this blog post and is not in the submitted letter due to word count restrictions.

I am aware that audit results for Johnson County were presented to the Commissioners’ Court on April 25, 2011. The audit, for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, reported a significant increase in the unrestricted fund balance ($6 million was the number I heard) that according to the audit is due to rebounding property values. It is reported that Commissioners were unaware of this information until the report was released.

After reading the report, I found it oddly similar to the audit report issued for the Burleson ISD in November for the period ending June 30, 2010. As I recall, PCT 3 Commissioner Jerry Stringer was extremely vocal with his opinion of the BISD board and administration for not knowing about excess funds that were reported in their audit. I think that one would have to be totally blind to not notice how similar these two audits are unless there was some reason that prevented one from objectively looking at the situation.

While I find the audit reports of the county and the BISD perfectly acceptable in explaining why there was unexpected revenue, Commission Stringer must believe otherwise. When the BISD audit was released, Commissioner Stringer and friends took advantage of the report of under-projected revenue to make charges of malfeasance and mis-management. This leaves one to wonder how Mr. Stringer intends to spin the county audit report so that it doesn’t bring recriminations onto him and the rest of the Court such as he brought onto the BISD officials.

Mr. Stringer can say that he is not guilty of all I have laid out herein, but Commissioner Stringer knows it is true.  He sat behind me in the November BISD board meeting where the $5.1 million question was explained in public. I listened to his  rude, condescending comments made to another sitting nearby. He refused to accept any explanation for the excess revenue other than what he could condemn. . He left there with his notes and by December 1st, those notes were included in his friend and  ESD appointee, Keith Kelly's letter to the community published in the Burleson Star. Commissioner Springer and members of his family are known to have made disparaging comments around the community about how  our district officials. 

Commissioner Stringer became known by spending years at BHS as a Resource Officer. He then took the opportunity to turn it into an $80,000 job, attacking and besmirching the very district that gave him the public exposure to help attain his elected position. I call his actions extremely bad form. .

 

To make amends, it would be nice if Commissioner Stringer took the lead, compared the two reports and announced publicly that he had been wrong about the BISD.  However, it won’t undo the damage to those whose reputations and careers were affected by his unfounded accusations. What goes around always comes around.

Audit copy -

http://www.johnsoncountytx.org/webadmin/uploads/FY2010CAFR.pdf)

Just sayin...for the second time.

Ann Rose