One on One with Musselshell County Commissioner Nicole Borner

Part 1

 

September 9, 2020

Nicole Borner

I sat down with Musselshell County Commissioner Nicole Borner and discussed the recently completed audits that Musselshell County has had to endure due to years of neglect and kicking the proverbial can down the stairs. We also talked about the county's budget and where the focus should be moving forward..

Nicole is completing her first term as county commissioner at the end of December, 2020. She is running for re-election and she shared how the campaign is going and what she hopes for in this election year.

Nicole, I'm just gonna let you begin where you feel like starting.

A lot of people have been talking and writing about audits and whether they're essential to the county or not. Audits most certainly are vital to the county. It is a statutory requirement. If you don't have current audited financials and the monthly balances aren't accurate, you cannot know what your cash balance is and cannot have verified ending cash reserves. It's critical for setting the budget for the next year. When you're not in compliance with your audits, you are breaking the law and you're at risk of denial for any grants and also at risk of losing entitlement funds from the State.


(Question) Was this situation in existence before Adam took his seat as county commissioner?

Yes. In 2016 when Adam was an employee he voiced his concern that we were out of compliance with our 2013-2014 audits. He informed the commissioners at that time that if we didn't get into compliance we could lose the FEMA grant and other grants.

I became aware of the late Annual Financial Reports (AFR) in 2017 because of a late fee bill. So I looked into that a little bit, and that's when I found out that the state is saying that if you're not in compliance with your audits, you're not fulfilling your AFRs. They explained to me: These are red flags. This is why you do audits, and this is why you do AFRs. This has to do with the transparency of the publics' tax dollars. So, I brought this issue to the other commissioners, my concerns, and what we can do to help the accounting officer be better at the job and get these reports and audits completed. Our job is to manage and supervise that department and make sure the work is being done correctly and on time. I was voted down by Bob Goffena and Tom Berry. Musselshell County was in a situation that the state government could step in and have an auditor take over our books.

(Question) So, if Adam had not taken Bob's seat and nothing had been done, at some point, the state would have stepped in and lowered the boom.

Only if a citizen had made a complaint. The state wouldn't have done it on their own. It takes a citizen to say, hey, my county is not in compliance and is not being fiduciarily responsible with our money. That's how it would have happened. The state doesn't do anything, but they can advise you. So, what I did as a commissioner is I educated myself. I called the auditors at the state and asked, what does this mean and how do we fix it? I brought solutions to the table. Still, it takes two-thirds of the commission to address anything, whether it's an employee issue or a monetary issue or a budgetary issue. I was voted down. Past commissioners know that there are things that happen behind the scenes that the public is not aware of because there are sensitive HR issues. The past commissioners are fully aware that there's more about what happened than the public or even themselves are going to know because they weren't sitting commissioners at the time.

(Question) What about some of these grants, like the FEMA grant, do they have the authority to say, we're not going to give you the funds because your paperwork is not making any sense?

They will tell you that you're not doing what you're supposed to be doing, so we will deny you funding until you get this cleared up. Thankfully, we never got to that point. I was in conversation with the state the whole time we worked on cleaning up the books. We are financially healthy now and are in full compliance because we just got them done by June 2020. The AFR's were caught up a couple of weeks ago. We were in full compliance now. We had until September to bring ourselves into compliance for big grants. Otherwise, we would have lost a substantial grants for the hospital and county infrastructure work.

(Question) How much in dollars and cents?

Over $700,000 for the Hospital Delivery Local Assistance (DLA) grant, $1,040,000 for the Goffena Bridge project which is a TSEP and MDT grant combined and a $500,000 DNRC Reclamation Grant that is a huge part of our match for the FEMA mitigation Grant. We also have a couple smaller Coal Board grants that were at risk.

The fact is: the county in 2012 was starting to fall behind in their audits. In 2015 the county started falling behind in their AFR reports and the audits got further behind. The truth was in 2017, I went to the other two commissioners to address that problem. And it was not taken seriously. And then, in 2019, the board became aware of a pretty egregious problem that then precipitated an employee resigning. This left the county during the start of a new budget season with a mess.

Part Two Next Week

 

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