End of May and Beginning of June: School’s Out
'Twas a special meeting.
Note: This is a catchup article, and will not deal with the big news of July 3, or the June council meeting. More on those to come.
Florence Bixby, who shaped the lives of many Elberta kids with her teaching and served the wider community as an educator, florist, and historian, died at the age of 102 on June 15. A service was held July 1 at Frankfort United Methodist Church. You can read her obituary here.
Another safe passage, we believe, to the beyond was taken on June 14 by Axel Anderson, an Elberta native who worked for the Ann Arbor Railroad until the car ferries ceased operation.
If you have memories of Mrs. Bixby or Mr. Anderson that you’d like to share, please do so in a comment below.
Special Meeting May 30
At which Council chose an auditor for fiscal year 2023–24, and chose a contractor to re-create rotting doors on the historic Elberta Life Saving Station.
Brett McGregor brought doughnuts. They didn’t make it into the official minutes.
The Audit
We received proposals from just two auditors, and the bids diverged, at about $10,000 for the first year from Gabridge & Co. and $35K–$40K for the first year from Morgan and Associates.
I had googled Gabridge & Co., the auditor we ended up choosing, and didn’t see any glaring bad Yelps or other red flags. The firm has done our audit in the past, Jen Wilkins said, back in the day.
“Back in what day?” I asked. “Pre-deficit days?”
“Probably deficit without [that fact] being out. It was before State Treasury got a hold of the situation,” Wilkins said.
I reminisced a bit about an auditor presentation I had witnessed some years back, around the time it became public knowledge that the State Treasury had put us on the watch list for Emergency Management.
Gabridge has dealt with a lot of other local entities, including Empire and Beulah.
Wilkins noted that because we’re behind on bank reconciliations and other accounting tasks, we should “seriously consider hiring an auditing firm to do work in the office” as a contingency measure in case we don’t find a qualified deputy treasurer candidate.
We were close to paying off our deficit as of last year, and we’re all concerned about backsliding.
I’ll take this opportunity, since it’s July now, to mention that the Office will be closed the week of July 15–19 because the Gabridge & Co will be there doing the audit, and UHY will be continuing its accounting services, helping us complete our backlogged bank reconciliations. Normally bank reconciliations would be done once a month, but we have gotten behind. The cost of these accounting services is being offset by money from State Treasury — but this is not a well we should expect to continuously draw from.
Wilkins said the auditors’ bids were based on the understanding that our books would be balanced and closed by the time of audit, and she was not sure that would be the case.
Wilkins has budgeted $45,000 for the audit. We are hoping that nothing will hold up the process and cause it to cost us more than Gabridge’s bid for the first year. Wilkins ran the bids by a contact at State Treasury, who said going with the lowest was a fine move.
“The good thing is that UHY is doing the books [now]. So what mistakes there could be aside from the reconciliations could be minor. And so that makes me feel better, because we have the accountants doing most of the work,” Wilkins said.
The Doors
Council had received a letter from Brian Lijewski of the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) about the intended repairs, generally in support of them but specifying that the glass in the windows should be clear.
The Lumber Shed had bid about $51,100, and RJ Raven (who we have used before) bid about $36,600 to replace/restore two double doors and one exterior door, not including door handles.
Wilkins said we have $21,709.90 remaining in ARPA funds, so we were able to put $4,000 more than expected toward the doors. The rest of the funds will come from gains in our MiClass investment account. Wilkins had taken an investment training through MiClass, and explained her strategy for how much, when, and from which funds to contribute to and withdraw from the account. The idea is to take as little as possible as late as possible from the investment account, so the market can do its magic.
Work on the doors will occur over eight weeks in the fall.
“So that puts us in October, November. Can they do it in the snow if the weather becomes … normal again for some reason?” I asked. Yes, Wilkins thought.
