Who’s accountable?
To the editor:
Could there be a more noble concept in our society than the idea that government officials – and their contractors – should always be held accountable?
Unfortunately, The Fort Myers Beach Town Council seems to want to duck this concept when it comes to finding out who is responsible for our town losing $2.4 million in water fee revenues over the last seven years.
That’s the amount of money town officials say we lost when, somehow, the $6.20 monthly service charge that’s supposed to be added to water bills wasn’t collected from each of the 6,337 condo and duplex units on our island between 2002 and now, a per unit charge that public records show our town adopted in 2001.
But the single family home owner was forced to pay that fee over the past seven years.
Omitting that charge on the condos cost the town $345,000 per year over the past seven years, town Finance Director Evelyn Wicks says. That income could have paid off what was left of the $3.3 million loan we made to buy the system in 2001. Instead, we still owe $2.5 million.
Collecting those fees also could have kept our town legal when it comes to the requirements of the loan the town made to buy the water system.
But that loan is in non-compliance because the town hasn’t attained the revenue stream from water revenues that it promised in the loan.
At least one council member, Tom Babcock, wanted to make that collection retroactive and get what we’re owed going back to 2002. When other council members rejected that idea, Babcock asked to go back at least to January first of this year, but that reasonable request was also rejected by the others.
Right or wrong on the retroactive question, the council’s position of don’t ask don’t tell when it comes to finding out how this happened dodges government accountability. Most of the council, and even some of the staff, say they don’t believe there is any benefit in assigning “blame.”
Blame? The word is accountability folks.
A whole lot of accountability should be coming into question over the loss of $2.4 million in public revenues. Here are a few of the necessary questions: Where were the auditors? Where were the town officials responsible for overseeing the system? Where was the company we pay to do the customer billings?
And where were the various town managers over that period of time, other than the current manager who finally caught this expensive error?
There are folks on our council who believe that government should be run like a business. Do they really believe that IBM or Microsoft or even a pharmacy owner would not want to know who was responsible for a mistake that cost them huge sums of money? Of course they would. And so should this council.
Mayor Larry Kiker has consistently said there needs to be accountability in our government. Here’s your chance to put that concept into practice mayor.
To simply say we don’t want to get into blame and leave it at that is a miscarriage of public duty. It should be the duty of this council to dig deep and get a good picture of what went wrong, and why, so measures can be adopted to make sure it doesn’t happen again. And to see to it that whoever is responsible for this huge omission is rightfully identified and, if still with us, dealt with appropriately.
Until then, voters might want to think twice about approving more debt for fixing a broken water system run by a council that refuses to hold people accountable.
Fort Myers Beach Civic Association Board of Directors