Shelby County – Civility Hits New Low – “Oh, He’s Black”

Shelby Co. (ECWd) –

Shelby County had its long-awaited draft audit presented to them during the August regular meeting.  The Auditor, Timothy Watson with Benford Brown & Associates presented the audit and within the first few moments of his appearing on the screen, a comment was made by a woman near the back of the board room, just over my left shoulder.

“Oh, he’s Black”

Unfortunately the comment, like many others made throughout the meeting by a select few in the audience, was not picked up by the microphone however I know what I heard.  It was appalling.  Yes, Watson is a Black man.  He is a partner in the firm hired to do the audit.  Sadly, similar comments were made after a meeting years ago when the Co-Founder of the firm presented their proposal to the county board.  She too is Black.

I’m thankful that the members of this board who voted to hire them did so without such racial bias.  And to set the record straight with full disclosure, Benford Brown & Associates has never done tax work for ECWd, nor does ECWd own and operate a C3.  Those false accusations have been circulated in childish attempts to discredit the auditors.  Benford Brown & Associates has done tax preparation work for American Watchdogs Inc., which is a C3 and independent of any other organization.

For those listening to key points made by the auditor and answers to board members’ questions, it became clear the years of cries from the County Treasurer were vindicated.  Decentralization of financials was the primary theme, as key components of the financials were not being provided to the treasurer for that office to do the job as spelled out in the statute.  We understand one of the findings outlines the accounts held by other offices outside the treasurer’s office.

It became clear during the presentation that certain members of the public were not happy as the false narrative being pushed through local propaganda on social media was debunked.  The findings in the audit were not the fault of the Treasurer and it was confirmed, the delay in the audit was not the fault of the Treasurer or the County Chairman.  That fact was not well received by a few in what may be best described as the Peanut Gallery, a small group of citizens who made comments throughout the meeting.

The entire video of the meeting is below with the audit portion taking just over 2.5 hours.  The final version is anticipated to be provided in a week according to the auditor as there are some corrections to some recommendations and notes as well as the Budget vs Actual expenditure portions of the budget to be added.

A notable point made by County Board member Tad Mayhall was how the board has failed to fix past findings.  He pointed to the legislative committee as the one who should have been providing these fixes all while failing to know the history.  As pointed out by the Chairman, the past auditing firm, which was also presented by Zoom, had no findings, not to mention they failed to complete the audit which was a contributor to the delay in the current one.

With no findings in the prior audit, what does Mayhall want them to fix as we have heard zero suggestions from him?   All that aside, the current board has been trying to implement fixes to know problems like the credit card policy and the electronic timekeeping policy that Mayhall opposed.  Mayhall’s opposition to that policy was rooted in a false claim at the prior county board meeting that his email box was full of emails from department heads on a daily basis.  A Freedom of Information Act request production by Mayhall proved his comments were nothing more than grandstanding as he only produced a single department head’s emails of which only 2 had anything to do with the timekeeping policy.  His attempt to dispute what I requested failed miserably when I handed him a copy of the FOIA request during my public comment.  Rather than accept that he was wrong with his false assertion about my FOIA, he deflected and implied I should get the information from the Treasurer.

We would like to note Mayhall did point out his concerns about the size of the county board during the discussion about an advisory referendum to reduce the size of the board, which is the largest per capita in the entire state.  Sadly, a fix to that failed several years ago thanks to former Chairman Bryan Coffman and Gary Patterson leading the charge to leave the size of the board as is, 22 members.

Once we receive either the two drafts or the final version we will update with a new article.

The video of the meeting is below and is just over 5 hours long.  I believe that makes this the longest County Board meeting we have ever attended.