Enough blame to go around

It was pretty clear on Friday that at least one Lincoln County official was willing to accept responsibility for the mistakes that cost taxpayers more than $2 million.

County Clerk and Recorder Tammy Lauer was trembling as she stood behind the podium in City Hall to explain her role in the miscalculations that caused the county to overtax residents repeatedly during the past several years. Her voice quaked as she addressed dozens of frustrated taxpayers who attended the press conference.

What Lauer said took a lot of courage. It must have been supremely difficult to explain that she was the person who put the wrong figures into a budget spreadsheet year after year.

She didn’t make excuses. She didn’t point fingers at others. She said if someone is to blame, then it would be her. And then she apologized.

Other county officials, who are just as culpable as Lauer, should have followed her example.

Instead, County Commissioner Tony Berget reluctantly admitted that the county commissioners were responsible for some vague portion of the mistakes – but only after members of the media repeatedly asked him whether the commissioners should have caught the error before it grew to such mammoth proportions.

The two other commissioners, Ron Downey and Mike Cole, did not speak at all. They sat in their seats next to the podium for almost two hours as Lauer, Berget and Montana Association of Counties Executive Director Harold Blattie explained the errors that caused the overtaxation.

The three commissioners make up the governing body that approves the county budget every year. They are at the top of the county food chain. And they were elected to provide oversight of all county operations, most importantly the county budget.

As such, the commissioners are directly responsible for ratifying Lauer’s mistakes. But none of them were willing to say those words. Maybe they were content to allow Lauer to shoulder the blame because they don’t understand their roles. Maybe it was because they didn’t know what to say. Or maybe they just couldn’t take the heat.

Making mistakes is one thing; avoiding responsibility for a failure of oversight is a whole different matter.

It’s become increasingly clear during the past couple of months that the county lacks responsible supervision. In December, for example, The Western News revealed that the county also raised the voter-approved mill limits on at least four special taxing districts without asking permission from the people who live in those districts.

The kicker is that none of the county’s elected officials realized there were any restrictions on the mills levied for those taxing districts. We had to point out to them that they had taxed residents at least $1.6 million more than the voter-approved limits for the Troy Area Dispatch District, Troy Parks and Recreation District, Libby Park District and the Eureka Dispatch District.

Berget, however, said recently that he knew some of those districts were getting too much money before we told him. He said he recognized there was a problem in October.

If that’s true, why he didn’t do something about it until we brought it to his attention in December, after taxpayers in Troy complained to us about their tax bills?

But even more concerning is the fact that county officials tried to avoid responsibility for the special taxing districts. At one point during the press conference, Berget made it clear that he believes the board members for those districts were liable for allowing the county to send them more money than voters had approved.

But that’s a stretch, considering the special taxing districts operate under the authority of the county and the county commissioners are supposed to serve as ex-officio members of those districts’ boards of directors.

Berget and Cole said they didn’t even know they were supposed to be on those boards. Downey, however, said he had attended a couple of board meetings for the Troy Area Dispatch District in recent years, although he never discussed the district budget at any of those meetings.

It’s still unclear whether the county had legal authority to raise taxes beyond voter-approved levels. Thanks to the diligent reporting of Phil Johnson, that question will be sorted out by the courts, the state Attorney General or the Legislature in due time.

Even though floating mills for special taxing districts is a gray area in the law, it’s abundantly clear that the county didn’t know what it was doing. When it was brought to the commissioners’ attention more than a month ago, each of them said the county shouldn’t have allowed taxes to be raised beyond what the voters had approved.

In addition to the obvious lack of budgetary oversight, some of the statements that were made by county officials during the press conference were not entirely true.  

For example, county officials made it seem as though the excessive tax revenue collected on behalf of the special taxing districts was simply stashed in various reserve accounts and would be available when needed. However, while some of the money might be unspent, there is insurmountable evidence that a large portion of the money is long gone.  

Also, despite Lauer’s courageous performance, she went too far when she said only one special taxing district had alerted her office that it was receiving too much money during recent years. In fact, board members from three of the districts informed us that they had alerted her office that an error may have occurred.

As much as the county might want all of this to go away – particularly those elected officials who are going to be on the ballot this fall – the problems have grown too big to ignore. And if they are not completely honest when addressing the people they represent, they risk losing the public’s trust to be part of the solution.

(Matt Bunk is publisher of The Western News.)