A Vero Beach City Council majority last week finally spoke up, demanding monthly reports on city finances to rebuild public trust.
The council has not received regular financial data in public outside of the summer budgeting process since City Manager Monte Falls took over from predecessor Jim O’Connor in 2019.
While Mayor John Cotugno appeares to have stalled resumption of these reports until August, if the Council actually starts getting them, Vero Beach probably will not need to move forward with Cotugno’s proposal to hire a pricey PR guru to put a positive spin on the city’s missteps.
Had former city finance director Steve Dionne appeared before the five elected officials on a monthly basis, on camera, Vero might have been saved a whole lot of embarrassment, and avoided more than a quarter-million in losses from state sales tax and interest paid on two years of late pension contributions.
The public record is unclear exactly when or why monthly financial reporting to City Council was replaced by quarterly financial reporting to the volunteer city Finance Commission at meetings nobody watches.
But at least two former Vero mayors recently reminded city officials that things weren’t always so lax, and that the City Council used to take its fiduciary responsibility more seriously.
Picking up on that, Councilman Taylor Dingle last week asked that staff be directed to resume monthly in-person financial reporting to the City Council.
“In my office here at City Hall I have a library of monthly general ledgers and quarterly finance reports from years past. I believe it’s an exceptional business practice we should start again at the city,” Dingle said. “It will assist us with transparency, and the credibility gap that we’re experiencing right now.”
Vice Mayor Linda Moore called the printed, bound quarterly financial reports of years past “madness,” saying she favors something simpler.
Dingle said the reports don’t need to be elaborately bound and printed, “as long as we have a digital copy, and we have it every month, and it’s accessible to the residents of the city of Vero Beach.”
He received full-throated support from Councilman Aaron Vos – who has conducted extensive analysis into failures leading up to the state slapping Vero with enforcement actions in February – and from Councilman John Carroll, who asked for more robust financial reporting shortly after being elected, but was largely ignored.
“Thank you, Councilman Dingle for bringing this up. All if us have been very concerned about the lack of information the council has been provided the last few months in regards to the finances,” Carroll said. “And in these unforeseen circumstances, the sooner we know what’s going on, the better.”
Mayor John Cotugno said new city Finance Director Lisa Burnham is likely too busy to begin financial reporting right away. He suggested the council wait until after July budget workshops.
Cotugno remains super-humanly loyal to Falls and his “one bad apple” narrative blaming ousted Finance Director Dionne for all the city’s woes. Dionne allegedly duped Falls and everyone else in the city government.
Vos does not subscribe to that theory.
Through his own painstaking analysis, independent of extensive reporting by Vero Beach 32963 arriving at similar conclusions, Vos has found a more serious, systemic breakdown occurred, and will keep occurring despite new personnel in place.
“In my past history I had to do root-cause corrective action for a lot of different programs, be it engineering or financial and I have in my notes a list of items I’ve identified that need some sort of corrective action,” Vos said, explaining his fishbone diagram method where he color codes systems that worked in green, systems unrelated to the failure in red, and systems contributing to the failure in yellow.
“There are more yellows, which means potential contributor to the issue than I’ve ever seen in any of my studies for corrective actions for troubled programs,” Vos said. “There’s a lot of work we have to do within the city financial as well as our boards and commissions as well that can help get our finances back in order.”
Starting presumably this month (or August with Cotugno’s delay), the City Council will expect Burnham to report on Vero’s financial position, on how expenses are running as compared to the budget, and on any other concerns or irregularities under her purview.
Vos also asked for a complete shared calendar of events such as financial filing deadlines the city must meet, so the City Council can ask, in public, if Burnham and her now-beefed-up Finance Department staff will complete those mission-critical tasks on time.
Under normal circumstances this might seem like micromanaging, but it’s clear that Falls was not on top of many important items in 2023, 2024 and early 2025.
Meanwhile, Burnham stood before the city’s Police Pension Board May 21 unprepared to report quarter-end financials from Dec. 31 and March 31, and then announced this year’s audit would be filed at least two months late – missing the state’s June 30 deadline.
She will need to request an extension of time to file the city’s 2023-24 audited financials.
Normally a 90-day extension until Sept. 30 would be fairly automatic, but considering the city filed last year’s audit 10 months late, securing that extension immediately should be a top priority.
As of Friday, the City Clerk’s office could find no such extension request sent to state officials by Burnham, nor any documents granting the city an audit filing extension.
