Money mess hampers Wheaton park district board
It's been almost a year and a half since Rob Robinson resigned as the Wheaton Park District executive director, but park commissioners were still accounting for his tenure Wednesday night.
The mostly new board of commissioners has struggled to find a financial point of comparison to judge the district's operations since they've come on board.
That's because checks were written during Robinson's tenure, but no one was recording the transactions on a timely basis. The money was always there, but the internal records were not kept.
That reality almost prevented commissioners from agreeing to a staff recommendation to change the district's fiscal year to match the calendar year Wednesday. They believed the switch might delay the board's ability to match financial statements on a month-to-month, year-to-year basis.
Executive Director Mike Benard said changing the fiscal year will have no impact on the board's ability to have those comparisons. No matter what, those numbers won't be ready until at least September as park staff continues to try to recreate the missing bookkeeping from Robinson's tenure.
"You don't have apples and apples last fiscal year and now, and you're not going to have that," Benard said. "In other words, your history is already corrupted. We're doing our best to correct it. We can't give you what you want because it does not exist. We can't give you what wasn't created."
In the end, the majority of commissioners agreed to change the fiscal year. Board President Dave Blankenship was the lone "no" vote.
After the meeting, Benard explained the bookkeeping period his staff is rebuilding is roughly a year and half.
"I wouldn't call it mismanagement," Benard said. "There was no one here to do it. It just wasn't done. The right people weren't here to do it. There wasn't someone there doing it wrong."
Benard said, at this point, the district is able to account for every dollar spent during the flawed bookkeeping period. He assured the taxpayers that the district is in a solid financial condition.
"We don't have financial turmoil," Benard said. "We're not a financially fractured organization."