Tag Archives: Becky Hasart

Maupin calls for Bremerton salary cuts

Bremerton City Council President Will Maupin sent a letter to Mayor Patty Lent and Financial Services Director Becky Hasart calling for major changes in the city’s 2012 budget. He also leveled an interesting claim about how department directors were instructed to address the changes with the council.

“This year, the Council was not afforded the opportunity to provide input early in the process and I understand that department heads were warned to not argue against the administration’s budget on threat of being fired.” — Will Maupin

Maupin faults the administration and the council for how the budget has been handled and said he looks forward to a meeting today (Monday) to hammer out some details before the council approves the final spending plan on Wednesday, which in theory could change.

Among the changes he calls for are a 15 percent reduction in executive salaries, the assumption of furloughs for city employees and a reduction in layoffs down to less than 10.

I’ve called both Maupin and Lent for comment and received voice mail. I presume they are meeting now. We’ll have a story later (in print Tuesday). The letter follows.

Patty & Becky,

The purpose of this memo is to provide input on the budget and the budget process to help finalize this year’s budget and to help avoid the same mistakes in the future.

I think that the administration, myself and the entire Council have made mistakes during the development of this budget. The budget contains several controversial proposals and was developed by the administration with very little input from the Council and department heads. Past budgets have been a team effort between the administration, the Council and the department heads. This year, the Council was not afforded the opportunity to provide input early in the process and I understand that department heads were warned to not argue against the administration’s budget on threat of being fired.

At this point, some of the administration’s proposals for revenue enhancement have been approved by Council for the 2012 budget. In the future, things like increases in PILOT, increased parking taxes, shifting funds to the street department, significant numbers of layoffs, etc., should be discussed with the Council before budget preparation begins.

Since the budget was delivered to the Council late, the Council accepted the task of changing or eliminating some of the elements of the administration’s budget proposal while trying to keep it balanced. In retrospect, the Council should have decided which of the proposals were acceptable and which were not and should have sent the budget back to the administration for further work. We should not have tried to do the administration’s work for them.

As I discussed with Becky on Thursday, here are some of the elements the Council wants incorporated in the revised budget proposal:

Salaries for high paid members of management, including the mayor, should be reduced by a meaningful amount (about 15%) through furloughs or other actions.
Furloughs should be used for other employees to avoid layoffs.
The executive budget should be examined to make sure it contains only required expenditures in this difficult economic period.
The budget should assume salary concessions by labor unions.
The budget should assume additional contributions to health insurance costs by employees.
The budget should assume no layoffs in utility fund positions and that a utility rate study will be done in early 2012.
The budget should include fewer than 10 layoffs in the general fund.

Although we did not discuss these items, I would like them addressed:

Retain a total of four positions in the electronics division.
Present a plan for executing street repairs, including the number of positions to be retained, considering that we approved funding for streets from parking tax, stormwater PILOT and $20 car tab fees.

Another issue we discussed on Thursday is that the Council requests that the administration prepare a narrative explaining the principles behind the elements included in the budget. The Council never received a briefing on what the administration was trying to accomplish with the 2012 budget. We only received an explanation of the individual elements. The Council still does not know why the budget included laying off as many people as was proposed while maintaining staff and management salaries at high levels. This narrative should include a discussion of the long term (the next two or three years) plan for PILOT, parking taxes, furloughs, health insurance costs and layoffs.

I think the action taken by the Council last Wednesday to delay action on the budget gives us a chance to make significant changes which will benefit all the citizens of Bremerton. I look forward to meeting with you on Monday afternoon to review the administration’s new budget proposal. I hope the proposal is something we can both support and present to the entire Council with a recommendation to approve.

Will Maupin
President, Bremerton City Council

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post

Vetting a City’s Candidate

On Wednesday night’s Bremerton City Council agenda is the nomination of Becky Hasart to take over as the city’s finance director. A week ago we had a story about what happened when and after she was in Washougal. In short, the city was tagged with findings for missing money. Essentially, the city spent money on festivals and a farmers’ market and missed on several procedures and was reimbursed for too little. Many of those expenditures came from the mayor’s office.

That kind of mess cannot look good for a candidate wishing to run the finances of another city and it certainly was a hurdle Hasart had to overcome. She did it successfully, though, not only in Bremerton but in at least one other location where she was offered a job. Hasart also had an interview lined up for another government. She canceled it when she was offered the Bremerton job, she told me.

The first sense that there was an issue came in a Bremerton City Council study session when City Councilman Will Maupin said the city’s prime candidate had been on the right side of a mess at Washougal.

Once we had Hasart’s name, we did some checking of our own. We read the state auditor’s reports and news stories from The Columbian, The Oregonian and the Camas-Washougal Post-Record. I talked to a Columbian reporter, the city’s current mayor and Hasart herself, Bremerton Mayor Patty Lent and Maupin. I sought further help from the auditor’s office in finding a summary letter he wrote outlining the issues he found. I also tried to contact the former mayor of Washougal, but was unsuccessful.

The auditor’s reports are effective for finding out what the problems are, but in the end are not all that useful in determining exactly why they happened. Some of the poor practices named in the report could fall on the finance director, but other people within the city have the ability to spend money before the finance director has the chance to correct a problem.

Washougal did get issued another finding in an earlier year, because of a problem Hasart said she found herself. That kind of finding is not all that uncommon.

In the case of the missing money, however, no such clarity exists. Hasart’s name appears in the audit, but so does the mayor’s and every member of the city council. They are in a list of city officers.

Where Hasart got her most support was in the interviews Bremerton council members and the mayor did with others from Washougal. They were all supportive of Hasart. My experience with the city’s current mayor, Sean Guard, was pretty much the same, but I believe he might have been more reserved with me (a media member) than he was with Bremerton city officials who called. City officials are likely to be more candid with other city officials than they might be with a reporter.

There is, then, the other context, best illustrated by the story in The Oregonian. The former mayor, Stacey Sellers, fires almost all, if not all, the department heads, including Hasart. Her replacement for Hasart is a sitting city council member who the city later learned had had his law license suspended for misdealings with two clients. The council had also agreed to a mayor’s request that all questions from the council to department heads go through her, essentially shielding staff from the council.

The mayor and the Hasart’s replacement went to Las Vegas for a conference and among the charges they made on a city credit card were for alcohol, including $88 for a 2000 bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo. Washington taxpayers are not obligated to pay for city officials’ alcohol, so those charges were disallowed. Sellers was trounced in her bid for re-election and resigned shortly after the election. She did repay the charges for those drinks.

Because the auditor could not get cooperation in his look at what caused the city to misspend money, he couldn’t make any conclusion for why it happened. A non-profit that was the recipient of some of the money refused to be interviewed or provide some records. Others I spoke to, however, said Hasart helped in the investigation. After she left the city she also helped Washougal as it prepared its 2010 budget. She did it for nothing, according to Guard.

The current mayor has since asked the Clark County Sheriff’s Office to investigate what happened in the city. Nothing has come of that yet.

Hasart interviewed well when she met with those in Bremerton on the interview panel. Some were reminded of Laura Lyon, former Bremerton finance director now with the Bremerton Housing Authority. They said she displayed a knowledge of city finances necessary for someone about to take on the job.

Making the decision to look into something further depends on a lot of elements. From what I received in one day of checking into this matter, it seems to me that if I spent a lot of time looking into this more the possibility is high that if I did find a solid place to lay the blame, it would be with someone besides Hasart. We will likely not be able to make any conclusions until the sheriff and prosecutor down in Clark County decide that charges should be filed against someone, if that ever happens.

I do still have a question about the mayor of Washougal having that much discretion over that much spending, but based on the narrative I heard from others down there, it is not out of the question. Mayors have budgets. Mayors make decisions. This money that’s unaccounted for did come from the mayor’s office.

And people do find themselves working in bad situations they cannot control. That’s what people tried to tell me happened to Hasart. For Bremerton’s sake, everyone here has to hope they’re right.

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post