GLADSTONE — The regular meeting of the Gladstone City Commission was preceded by an audit of the city’s past fiscal year.

Knowing that both candidates running to hold a seat on the Gladstone City Commission and citizens say they are concerned about the city’s spending, seated commissioners have encouraged people to get involved; ask questions; review for themselves the audit prepared by Anderson, Tackman and Company; and attend the work session on the 28th, during which Certified Public Accountant Kathleen Ciantar discussed the review of Gladstone’s fiscal year ending in March 2024 at length.

The auditor’s report was made accessible to the public and uploaded to the city’s website on Tuesday, Oct. 15, giving people nearly two weeks before the presentation and work session to peruse the 96-page document if they chose.

Just last week, both candidates challenging Commissioner Steve O’Driscoll for his seat — Mike O’Connor and Steve Viau — said during the voter forum that Gladstone’s budget needed to be looked at closely.

On Monday, at 5 p.m., with CPA Ciantar from Anderson Tackman prepared to discuss Gladstone’s spending, Mayor Joe Thompson opened the floor for public comment. While an outside, unbiased accountant was on hand with numbers in front of her, this would have been the time for any concerned citizen to raise a question.

No one spoke, because no one was in the audience.

Continuing on, the independent auditor’s report stated that the financial statements from Gladstone were “in accordance with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.”

The city’s net position had increased by about 15%, but the spending was said to be comparable to the previous years. The overall increase of revenues, which exceeded expenses, “was due to capital contributions in the waste water fund, investment earnings, increased taxable value, and other grants while controlling costs,” the report said.

In the section on “budget violations,” which Ciantar said is always included because there’s bound to be unforeseen fluctuations, variances were noted by department: City Hall had been over budget by $23,754; Public Safety was under by $69,754; Public Works’ surface maintenance was over by $42,409.

In the grand scheme, “they’re all kind of piddly amounts. There’s nothing there that is really concerning to me as far as being over budget,” Ciantar said.

Recommendations to the City of Gladstone by the accountants included:

– working to maintain the the minimum unrestricted fund balance in the General Fund.

– consistency and strengthened controls and procedures around long-term lease contracts with utility companies that use city infrastructure.

– establishing a methodology around estimating uncollectible accounts receivable.

– better documentation in the general ledger of inventory additions in the electric department.

City Manager Eric Buckman requested that next year, the major street fund and the fund for local streets appear side-by-side on the review, since the city transfers money between the two.

Towards the end of the work session, a few people trickled in and stayed for the 6 p.m. Gladstone City Commission regular meeting, which did not include the accountant. One was O’Connor, who spoke during public comment to remark that income from public utilities should be kept separate from other city accounts.

Doug Bovin, who had served as a Gladstone City Commissioner 55 years ago and then held other public offices, also stood at the podium to say that “it would be a disaster” for Gladstone if the ballot proposal to remove special assessments passes in November.

The only new business on the agenda was a change order for the wastewater treatment plant improvements. A few new steps are being taken for a cost increase of $178,458 to the contract that’s over $18 million in total. Even with the addition of the latest change order — which the commission approved on Monday — only about 40% of the contingency built into the budget has been used, and the project is nearly complete.

One adjustment is for reconfigured piping in one area, which the wastewater department and C2AE believe will make operations cleaner and safer overall. Another more costly change is for the removal and replacement of sludge recirculation pumps that they had thought the new plant would be able to operate with but are coming up short.

“The pumps that we had in there had poor suction lift reliability,” said C2AE’s Darren Pionk. He said that they looked into seeing if they could employ them elsewhere, but it wasn’t plausible, and the new ones — self-priming, for one — will be better.

The pumps to be replaced are in use currently, because the city’s new plant is essentially being built right on top of the old one it’s replacing, so other charges include disconnecting electrical components and reattaching the necessary elements with the new parts. Pionk explained that the quote provided from the contractor has been reduced, and that C2AE is “working on engineering amendments in regards to some reduction in cost on our end as well.”

When the time came for city commission reports at the end of the meeting, O’Driscoll shared some facts he’d found after looking into the history of taxes in Gladstone.

“There’s a lot said off the cuff without being informed, that our ‘taxes just keep going up,'” O’Driscoll said. “There are people that say that, and they are terribly misinformed.”

Looking at numbers dating back to 1961, he shared that rates had been around 17 mills back in the ’80s and ’90s. Right now, Gladstone’s millage rate is 15.47, he said, and “predominantly, our city taxes have been 15 and a half mills or more for as long as I’ve been alive and before that.”

Once the new school is paid off in a couple years, he pointed out, total taxes paid by Gladstone residents will drop, unless a new measure is adopted. “So those who throw around ‘our taxes are always going up,’ it’s a bit of an erroneous statement that those people are making, and it’s hazardous,” O’Driscoll said.

In other closing statements, Commissioner Brad Mantela made sure to let people know that early voting is going on now, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. seven days a week at Wells Township Hall.