More than four months after she was hired to be Vero Beach’s assistant finance director, Lisa Burnham still doesn’t understand why her now-former boss apparently did not see any need for additional resources to meet a state deadline for filing an already overdue audit.
“It was baffling to me,” Burnham said during a lengthy interview last week, only days after the interim label was removed from her title and she was appointed the city’s permanent finance director, replacing the deserved-to-be-fired Steve Dionne, who was asked to resign in February.
“I’m not sure what was going on, because I wasn’t there yet,” she added. “I can’t say what he was thinking. But, to me, you take the help that’s offered, especially in that situation.”
The situation?
On Oct. 29, Florida’s Joint Legislative Auditing Committee sent an email to Vero Beach telling the city it needed to file its audited financial statement for the 2022-23 fiscal year by Jan. 15 to avoid punitive action, which included the loss of some state funds.
The notice, which requested written acknowledgement of receipt, was addressed to Mayor John Cotugno and copied City Manager Monte Falls, who said he met with the Dionne and offered “any resources you need to get this thing done.”
According to Falls, Dionne told him no additional help was needed to file the city’s audit before the JLAC’s deadline, and the city manager said he took him at his word.
None of the three – Cotugno, Falls, or Dionne – ever bothered to respond to JLAC’s October email.
In February, however, Cotugno and Falls received official notice from JLAC that the city’s financials had not been submitted, and no filing extension – which likely would’ve been granted, given Vero Beach’s long history of compliance – had been requested.
Last Friday, Burnham spoke openly about the mess she inherited when she signed on in January to serve as Dionne’s lieutenant, eventually replacing him and completing the audit on April 30 – more than three months late, resulting in the city forfeiting $130,000 in half-cent sales-tax revenue from the state.
Prior to taking the job here, Burnham, who turned 55 last week, worked for the city government in Troy, Michigan, for nearly 30 years, rising from a junior accountant in 1993 to the city’s controller in 2020 before retiring in 2022.
She understands how a city’s finance department should operate, and she considers the filing of annual audits to be a routine task.
Burnham said she was “shocked” to learn – in her first days on the job when Dionne dumped a sure-to-be-late audit on his newly hired deputy – that the audit she was to complete was for the 2022-23 fiscal year. She had assumed Dionne was talking about 2023-24.
“It never occurred to me that we were that far behind,” she said. “That should’ve been the first conversation we had. Instead, I found out the audit was for 2022-23 in a call from the auditor.”
Burnham said she doesn’t know why Dionne didn’t feel a sense of urgency regarding the audit, or why he failed to show more concern about the consequences of failing to file it on time.
“It didn’t affect just him and the staff,” she said. “It had a wide impact.”
In the weeks that followed, Burnham found the situation “quite overwhelming, especially being new and with nobody here to help. I wasn’t familiar with the software, which was different from what I used in Michigan, and it was very difficult to identify what had been done.”
There wasn’t much to see.
Burnham discovered that her predecessors – two previous assistant finance directors had resigned during Dionne’s 20-month run in Vero Beach – had made some initial progress with the audit, but the worked seemed to stop last summer.
As she began reviewing the small amount of work that had been done, she noticed the department’s communications with the city’s longtime outside auditing firm, Cherry Bekaert, had come to a halt.
“There was a long period of nothing being done, and the auditors weren’t getting anything,” Burnham said. “I wouldn’t say I had to re-do the whole thing, but there were a lot of important and time-consuming tasks left to do.
“I’ve never been one to shy away from challenges, and I made getting the audit done my priority,” she continued. “But when I saw what was in front of me, it was like: What the heck …?”
That’s not what Burnham envisioned when – after she and her husband relocated from Michigan to Port St. Lucie three years ago, and she was trying to figure out the next chapter of her life – she posted her resume on a job board.
Then came a call from Vero Beach, which was looking for an assistant finance director.
“It was the assistant’s job in a small city, which I figured would be a good way to ease back into working again,” Burnham said. “I thought it would be OK, that things won’t get crazy. But not too long after I got there, all this stuff started happening.
“I got this uh-oh feeling.”
Just over a month after her Jan. 13 start – “I’ll never forget the date,” she said – City Manager Monte Falls told Burnham that Dionne was gone and offered her the director’s job on an interim basis.
She accepted, knowing her No. 1 priority was to complete the city’s audit by the end of April, which was only 10 weeks away.
“In a matter of a few weeks, I went from hanging out with my dog and wondering what I was going to do that day, to working from early in the morning to very late in the afternoon – from having no sense of urgency to having to get something done on a deadline,” Burnham said.
“I gave it my all, because that’s the way I am,” she added. “I take my responsibilities seriously, but it was physically and mentally exhausting. I tried not to look at the big picture and focused just on what I needed to get done each day. But there were times I’d go home and think, ‘What just happened?’
“It definitely wasn’t the nice, slow, ease-back-into-it situation I was expecting.”
On the positive side, Burnham said the city’s Cherry Bekaert auditors have been helpful, the department heads have been supportive, and the finance department is now getting reinforcements.
Javier Gonzalez, who served as the city’s assistant finance director from 2011 to 2016, returned to his former position last week. And Kathy Taube, the city’s Risk and Benefits Administrator, is transferring back into the finance department, where she previously worked.
Outside accountants have also been brought in to help Burnham with the audit.
Now that the 2022-23 audit has been filed, Burnham has begun working on the financial statements needed for the 2023-24 audit, which is due next month.
Unlike her predecessor, she plans to ask JLAC to extend its June 30 deadline.
“We need the extension because we got behind with the 2022-23 audit,” Burnham said. “There’s no way even our auditors can do what needs to be done that quickly.”
She said she expects the 2023-24 audit to be complete “some time in August.”
Burnham said she is also continuing to address the city’s police pension fund contributions, describing them as a routine function for a municipal finance department.
“I don’t understand how it wasn’t done,” she said.
In addition, Burnham has begun reviewing the process and schedule for the City Council’s budget workshops, which will begin in July and continue into September, when Vero Beach’s fiscal 2025-26 budget will be approved.
By then, she plans to have Dionne’s mess cleaned up and the city’s finance department back on schedule.
In the meantime, Burnham fully expects to remain under a media microscope.
“I’m already stressed to the max, working extremely long hours and working as hard as I can, and that’s added another layer of stress,” Burnham said of local media coverage of the city’s audit troubles.
“I know what some people are saying about the city’s finances and, because of what happened, that might be the normal response,” she added. “Integrity and honesty are important to me, but I know I’m going to get caught up in it.”
The drive home to Port St. Lucie each day is a “nice buffer,” Burnham said, and she takes solace in the fact that nobody in her Sandpiper Bay neighborhood knows or cares about Vero Beach’s finances.
Also, she said she doesn’t consider the city to be in a financial crisis.
“There are some things we still need to fix, but things are moving forward in the right way,” Burnham said, adding, “We’re putting people in the right places, fine-tuning the processes and implementing safeguards. We also need to get a new financial software system.
“I can’t do anything about what happened before I got here, but I can make sure what happened doesn’t happen again.”
Despite the tumult that greeted her upon her arrival at City Hall, Burnham said she’s open to staying on the job for several more years – if she’s wanted.
“It has been difficult,” she said, “but it would’ve been difficult under normal circumstances.”
Not as difficult, though, as Dionne made it.
Photos by Joshua Kodis
