Meeting answers questions about Buffalo Grove Days money handling

Buffalo Grove Days has always included residents with disabilities in the annual Labor Day festivities. For years, the event featured wheelchair basketball. More recently, it added Buddy Baseball, which pairs children with disabilities and an able-bodied adult partner to play baseball.

Buffalo Grove Trustee Lisa Stone recently raised questions about the flow of donations to Buddy Baseball, and the way the Buffalo Grove Days money is handled. Those questions were addressed at a recent meeting that included village trustees, members of the Commission for Residents with Disabilities and the Buffalo Grove Days Committee.

"I think that people left the meeting satisfied that their questions had been answered," said Trustee DeAnn Glover, liaison to the Buffalo Grove Days Committee.

One of Stone's issues dealt with how donations to the Buddy Baseball event are processed. During a disabilities commission meeting last year, which Stone attended, someone asked why individual donations specifically written for Buddy Baseball didn't go directly to that program but instead went to Buffalo Grove Days.

"It just seemed so odd to me," Stone said this week. "It seems to me that if I write a check to cancer, I expect it to go to cancer."

Stone called for a special account for Buddy Baseball.

As Village Manager William Brimm explained, the Buffalo Grove Area Chamber of Commerce has been responsible for soliciting donations. Checks, he explained, would be written to Buffalo Grove Days. The money would then be given to the village for deposit into an overall account, from which the Commission for Residents with Disabilities and other interested parties would draw.

Over the past five years, the commission has spent $3,000 more than it received for all of its programs or services tied to Buffalo Grove Days, Brimm added.

Trustee Beverly Sussman, who has long been associated with the Commission for Residents with Disabilities, expressed interest in creating a separate ledger page for the disabilities donations and the change was made, Brimm said.

Another question Stone raised was about the collection of money during Buffalo Grove Days. Now, money from the event is collected by more than one person. In the past, that wasn't always the case. Sometimes Brimm, who has been working on the event for more than 30 years, most of that time while he was finance director, was the only staffer around to collect and count the money.

Stone said she was concerned about that, as well as the money being kept at the village before deposit rather than being placed in a locked drop box at a bank, because, "There is a lot of cash involved in Buffalo Grove Days. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash."

As Brimm explained, "For years - and I have been doing Buffalo Grove Days since 1978 - we would count the money in the finance department. There would be regular drops from many of the events. Money would be dropped off, mostly carnival money, and the money was counted in a locked village hall, in a locked finance department. We kept counting the money on a periodic basis and we put it in a locked cabinet inside a locked office inside a locked building."

Brimm said the village bought a safe a few years ago, and as many as three staff members are on hand for the counting, storage and deposit of the money.