LP Utilities Director Clashes With Council Over Budget

Municipal budget meetings are often dry and detail oriented, but at Tuesday's special budget meeting, the sparks flew.

Gary Freeman, utilities director, and accountant Jackie Haynes, were on the defensive.

Council members repeatedly asked Freeman and Haynes to explain how the proposed water department budget for 2008-2009 was determined.

The director and accountant explained Tuesday that a questionable budget line item for more than $450,000 was income from garbage and sewer fees collected by the water department.

Both maintained that the item was listed elsewhere on the budget to denote that the funds were transferred.

Haynes argued that the budget was proper and audited, but along with Freeman, could not explain why the numbers calculated by council differed by hundreds of thousands of dollars with those as explained by the pair.

At last week's meeting, Freeman told council that almost a half million dollar difference from the previous year's budget was due to a 20 percent decrease in demand for water usage.

By his calculations, Councilman Ray Royce said hundreds of thousands of dollars were unaccounted for in the budget, as recently presented by Freeman.

"You concocted a story," said Royce.

"You told us it was conservation," said Councilman Bill Brantley. "It was a lie ... you held (budget information) back until we didn't have time to review."

Freeman sat in the first row, just five feet from the podium. No one needed to raise a voice to be heard, in the nearly empty meeting room.

"I resent that," said Freeman. "That's not true."

The board decided to ask an outside accounting firm to consider the budget as submitted.

"We're not seeing eye to eye," said Brantley. "We need a third party."

Councilman Steve Bastardi and council agreed that another accountant should prepare a formula or template on proper budget presentation.

Freeman was also asked to project upcoming income by tallying each of about 2,000 customer accounts, on an invoice-by-invoice basis.

Freeman referred to that process as Zero Base Budgeting, a budgeting technique that he used during the 1980s.

He released a prepared statement on Wednesday.

"The people of the town of Lake Placid have a great analytical detail oriented council," wrote Freeman."They want us to take a much closer look at the origins of the revenues and expenses. I welcome this attitude and refer to it as 'Zero Base Budgeting'".