Brenton Davis administration posts final 2023 budget online — nine months after it was adopted

As Erie County Council prepares to deliberate the 2024 budget, the public can expect two things for certain: The budget will be adopted by the end of the year, and it will be posted online within a matter of days.

At least, that’s been the expectation until 2023.

The Erie County Executive Brenton Davis administration posted the final 2023 budget on Aug. 3, nearly nine months after it was adopted by council, and just two months shy of the 2024 budget season.

The budget was posted a day after the Erie Times-News sent an email to County Public Information Officer Chris Carroll inquiring about the budget’s absence on the Erie County website.

Carroll responded in an email, “Apparently, that was an oversight. We had originally thought that it was on the website this whole time.”

The “oversight” has done little to calm Democratic council members like Andre Horton who says council had requested the budget be posted for months, and that the late posting was another example of the administration not being transparent with the public.

“How can you defend not having the budget up until August?” Horton said in an interview with the Times-News. “There’s no justification. It’s called negligence. It’s called a lack of transparency.”

Despite the final budget being posted a day after the Times-News inquiry, Carroll said the administration first learned of the matter in July by former County Councilmember Mary Rennie.

Carroll said the county’s finance and IT departments began to investigate the matter but added it was “not a top priority at that time,” given the agenda items for council on July 6, which included the proposed business park in Fairview and Girard townships.

Carroll said a printed version of the final budget has been available for public inspection since Jan. 5 at the county’s finance office on the fifth floor of the Erie County Courthouse.

“Accordingly, there seemed no urgency,” Carroll said in the email.

Rennie rejects administration’s claims

Rennie, who resigned from council on July 24 due to what she described as a breakdown of the public process in county government, has pushed back on the administration’s claims.

An outspoken critic of Davis’s handling of the budget during her tenure, Rennie told the Times-News that she had repeatedly asked the administration to post the final 2023 budget over the course of the year.

Rennie even sent a June 14 email, obtained by the Times-News, asking County Director of Administration Doug Smith and Director of Finance Paul Lichtenwalter to post the final 2023 budget.

Rennie told the Times-News that many of her comments and inquiries to the finance department were ignored.

“That’s what is so concerning about what this administration is doing,” Rennie said. “They are absolutely short-circuiting the public’s right to know.”

Rennie further questioned Carroll’s claim that a printed version of the budget was always available at the courthouse, insisting "Nowhere have they ever advertised that the budget was available in finance."

“This is a public document, and it has always been online soon after it is signed by the county executive," she said.

Former accounting director says budget was always posted quickly

While the Erie County Home Rule Charter doesn't specify when exactly the final budget should be made public — it simply refers to the budget as a "public record" — it's been customary for administrations to post the final budget quickly.

For at least the last 10 years, it’s been posted online within two-to-seven days after the county executive signs off on it at the end of the year, said Sue Ellen Pasquale, who worked as county manager of accounting for more than 20 years.

“That was our goal,” she said. “We tried to get everything posted by then simply because you have a lot of department heads who would be asking, ‘What happened to my budget?’ They wanted to understand what had happened and we wanted to make that information available.”

Pasquale said any questions over a council action would be discussed with the council’s accountant, Joe Maloney, and the issue would be “resolved immediately.”

Maloney’s accounting firm, Maloney, Reed, Scarpitti & Company LLP, which had advised council with the annual budget since 1979, departed in 2022.

Maloney has not commented on the reason for the departure. But Horton has publicly speculated that the heated political environment within council and between council and the administration played a role.

"The political climate was a major factor, and it's rumored to be the factor in why we can't find another (accountant),” he said in an earlier interview with the Times-News.

Should council have more access to financial information?

With no accountant for the first time in four decades, council is at a crossroads: Should they have more access to financial information?

In an email to the Times-News, Carroll said the administration routinely provides financial reports to council and offers to run “any report that council wishes.”

Council Chairman Brian Shank, a Republican, has praised the finance department for its regular reports to council.

But Democratic members, including Horton and Terry Scutella, as well as Rennie in her former role, say they can't solely rely on the administration's financial team. Rather, they say it would be beneficial for council to have access to the Financial Management System, or FMS, a software tool used by the finance department to manage assets, income and expenses, and to support the administrative operations of county government.

Rennie has argued that other departments have access to the tool and that council, as the county’s primary fiduciary body, should have a better handle of county taxpayer dollars.

“County Council right now is in an awful situation,” she said. “They are in an information desert. They don’t have ready access to reliable finance numbers, budget figures, projections and analysis.”

Carroll said the administration “sees no practical reason” for council to have access to FMS. He said the Home Rule Charter places day-to-day operations, including budgetary transactions, under the administration and the finance department. He also said granting council members access to FMS would tread on the role of the Erie County Controller’s Office, which only has "read-only" access to FMS.

Erie County Controller Kyle Foust told the Times-News that he disagreed and said council, as the "legislative leaders of the county," should also have read-only access to FMS.

"Why they don’t have access is puzzling to me," he said. "And I don’t see how their access would tread on our role. We use it to do our job. Council would use it to do theirs; whether they have an accountant or not. This is all public information in the end. Why stand in the way of elected officials being more informed?"

The council is expected to receive the 2024 budget in October.

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A.J. Rao can be reached at arao@gannett.com. Follow him on X @ETNRao.

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Final 2023 Erie County budget posted online nine months after adopted