Ringo Starr: What money?
Stuttering John: The money your mother gave you for singing lessons.
Ringo Starr: I spent it on fish and chips?
I will be asking a version of this question tomorrow of the Union County commissioners at their zoom meeting though it will relate to the money that they claimed was going into the the state retirement system for their employees.
Union County budgets are often not so much exegetical as creative fiction. There are, of course, those made up numbers to justify stealing the Open Space tax and matching salaries by department is a crapshoot but you would think that payments to the Public Employees (PERS) and Police and Firemens (PFRS) Retirement Systems would be easy to check since the state sends out an invoice which most counties plug into their budget documents. Not so in Union County recently and what I will be questioning tomorrow:
As per the instructions on the website I prefer not to participate in the teleconference but have two questions for the record of the commissioners at the April 8, 2021 meeting regarding the 2021 budget. The questions are below:
In regard to the amounts budgeted for county contributions to the Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) and the Police and Firemen’s Retirement System (PFRS) the amounts listed on Sheet 21 are $17,819,400 and $17,004,791. However, per the state website the amounts billed and payable in April, 2021 were $17,669,400 and $16,688,596 respectively.
Question 1: To where is the additional $150,000 and $316,195, respectively, budgeted?
Question 2: Going back to the 2007 payments and including these for 2021 Union County has reported $1,943,150 in payments greater than what the state billed. Who got this additional money?
Backup data attached:
1) Appropriations pages on PERS and PFRS contributions going back to 2005.
2) Listing of PERS deposits taken from check registry data compared to budgeted amounts by year.
3) Listing of PFRS deposits taken from check registry data compared to budgeted amounts by year.
countywatchers 