| Remember when you used to play Monopoly or another board game and fought over who was “the banker”? Sometimes, you wanted that job because you had easy access to all that (play) money. Sometimes, you avoided that job like the plague because people demanded their payment on time, they shoved bills at you needing change, and heaven help you if you made a mistake. Turns out: it’s not that much different in real life, except the stakes are even higher. No one likes to pay taxes, but we all want things from government—good roads, police protection, park amenities. We want to make sure the City spends every dollar received carefully and for the right reasons. We don’t want to see waste, and we certainly don’t want to see fraud. Geez, we don’t even want to see an “honest mistake” because it’s still costly. The City is lucky to have a stellar Finance group who tracks all our spending, all our funding received, etc., etc. I’ve written about them before, but we can’t thank Kassandra and her team enough for their excellent, hard work. And, we also hire the State auditor to audit our books every year. Actually, we have to do this by law, and we have to pay for the privilege. But, aside from being a little grumpy at the State telling us we HAVE to hire them and then telling us we have to pay them too, it’s a good thing. We have a great working relationship with the auditor and always appreciate their feedback. The audit means someone totally outside the City of Sumner is checking our books, checking our process, checking our records. It’s not just a quick peek—trust me. They must have “fine toothed comb” written in their title somewhere. Bottom line is Sumner once again came through the audit cleanly with no findings. They always give recommendations for improvement, because there’s always room to improve, but their overall comments were complimentary for Sumner’s tracking and process. Remember, the Council is in the process of reviewing the budget for where we’ll spend your money in 2023-2024. In the meantime, you can rest easy that how we spent our money in 2021 was well. And you don’t even have to take our word for it. Mayor Kathy Hayden |
Categories: Around Town
