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LAKE GENEVA GAMES
The Lake Geneva Business Improvement District (BID) and the changes it is going through are because of causal moves made by the previous administration. Dave Nord cannot be blamed as he passed on out of things. Charlene Klein, the former mayor, remains as remote now as she was in being a real mayor. Jonie the Diner is no more here now than she was back then. What happened that is beginning to reveal a lot about the city’s finances…and therefore your money? What happened is that the city is about to write a check for $58,000 to the BID because they did not distribute all of the BID’s tax portion back when it was collected and due.
There will be a second check forthcoming when the final balancing is done. What happened there? Simple mistake? Nope.
The comptroller, yes, the comptroller under the old administration and now the new one decided on her own to modify the mil rate that was used to calculate what the BID was owed. The mil rate is the fractional percentage that is used to determine how much is calculated off of the collected city taxes of all kinds and then handed over to the BID every year. The comptroller simply raised the mil rate on the revenues which caused the payments to the BID to go down, dramatically. The BID runs off a budget that’s less than two hundred thousand dollars. The impact of that supposed mistake hurt the BID badly but then was it a mistake. The former administration had little use for the BID, or maybe even less. The city’s comptroller was a major supporter of the former administration, and her position does not allow for the modification or changing of mil rates. That’s the kind of stuff that gets considered by the finance committee at budget times and then recommendations are sent on to the city council for final consideration. Mil rates determine just how much tax calculations are going to result in higher or lower taxes and are vitally important not just to the city as an entity but to the citizens and businesses paying those taxes.
The comptroller was either bitterly mistaken with potentially brutal results (and right now it’s being checked out to see if the BID is not the only entity or entities that got stiffed) or she made the move purposely through her determination or because she was ordered to do what she did. What does that mean for the city, even if these ‘errors’ are corrected? Well, it means that the people probably chose the correct mayor to be in his position during the last elective process. It means that the current part-time administrator is doing the job that David Nord obviously, and continuously, did not.
What should be done with the city comptroller for this incident, or series of incidents? That’s going to fall right into the uncomfortable and difficult hands of this new mayor, who’s weather in awfully quickly. But his doing the job, and this discovery and the fix for the results of it, are demonstrating that he is indeed the right man for the job. The budget meetings are coming up for the coming year and that’s going to be interesting too. Wide open, everything on the table, without regard for secretive ‘reserve’ accounts (like under previous administrations), will be the order of the day, or the days of the coming budget meetings. The public will be welcome at one and all of those meetings, again indicating the kind of ‘fresh air’ policy and attitude of this great mayor.
How Todd will handle the comptroller mess, along with the city’s part-time city administrator is unknown but will certainly be reported on by the Geneva Shore Report.
