Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ Monday evening we received several phone calls and emails concerning an article by David Purtell, the Post’s city reporter, about city funds being “misappropriated” by a terminated employee working in the city’s customer service department (The department doing the city’s utility billing). Last week we heard sketchy details about this matter through the city grapevine because of a story we ran about the cover-up of “misappropriated” monies by someone formerly working in the city’s finance department.
A city press release, recorded in Purtell’s article, stated: “Assistant City Manager Zack Kyle announced a recent internal review conducted by the Salisbury Customer Service Division revealed a misappropriation of funds. As a result of the review, an employee has been immediately terminated. Furthermore, the City has requested an independent review by the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. No additional information will be available until the review is complete.”
Purtell noted that when he inquired about the situation city officials refused to release the name of the terminated employee and when the individual was fired, even though North Carolina public records laws require the city to release such information. The short-circuiting of Purtell’s inquiries comes as no surprise. It is city hall’s typical response to any significant public information requests. Salisbury’s city hall operates behind a wall of secrecy and by its own private interpretation of public records laws which runs counter to any known state statutes. City Hall’s chronic lack of transparency is well noted by a number of regional media especially when they made legitimate inquiries about the former city manager Doug Paris’s “mutual termination” and “golden parachute” or about Fibrant specifics. Private individuals, legally entitled to answers guaranteed to them by state public record statutes, have also met Salisbury’s municipal government’s wall of evasion.
The public, who pays for Salisbury’s city government among North Carolina’s upper tier of least transparent municipal governments, has a need to know. When money is misappropriated by city employees, the people best know about who that person is and how much money they pocketed. That person needs to be outed so individuals who might know pertinent information about the person-in-question can supply that information to investigatory bodies.
We hope the State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) is investigating and it leads eventually to a full-scale independent forensic audit of the city and Fibrant’s finances. A number of our citizens desire to know how Fibrant burned up its $33 million dollars certificates of participation from Fibrant’s “soft rollout” in November of 2010 until Fibrant ran out of money 10 months later in June 2011 and started siphoning monies from Rowan-Salisbury utilities to the eventual tune of $7.6 million dollars.
In an open and transparent city government the questions being asked Salisbury’s Municipal government should be answered without evasion and with reasonable speed. Corruption breeds in secrecy.
