Questions remain after Hoover CFO Jennifer Cornett reports on Finance Department corrective action plan
Last Monday, the City of Hoover held its regularly scheduled city council meeting, during which the city’s chief financial officer, Jennifer Cornett, spoke. In response to a request from Councilman Derrick Murphy, she presented an update and plan for remedying some of the concerns from the secretly commissioned forensic audit conducted by the nationally renowned firm Kroll. The presentation addressed some of the top issues but still left many questions. Residents have been asking these questions in earnest for months now at council meetings, as they’ve come across elected officials out locally and through petitions and phone calls. Yet, week after week, they’ve found that the mayor and council president rebuffs their concerns. Denying them answers or a venue to be provided answers. Three critical questions come to mind: first, why won’t city leadership create an open forum to address start to finish the legitimate questions that have been asked and ignored? This forum has been suggested not just by concerned residents but by Councilman Steve McClinton as well. Second, how can residents be sure these problems will be prevented in the future, not just in the Finance Department but also in other departments within the city? We know from the Kroll report and several former members of the council that the information was known to Hoover’s top, namely Mayor Frank Brocato and Council President John Lyda, yet worse than just being ignored, they were seemingly covered up and denied. Why did the checks and balances between the mayor’s office and the city council fail? How do voters prevent that failure in the future as well? Additionally, no one in the city has addressed the limitations described in the forensic audit, and if additional steps need to be taken to examine this administration and their financial dealings, departmental staffing beyond the Finance Department, and other issues brought to light through this process. Kroll described on Page 1 of their report, “In performing our forensic accounting and review and analysis of the Finance Department operations, we had certain limitations in our scope of review including a lack of accurate financial reports available from Munis and potentially thousands of electronic files that were deleted without any audit trail or definitive indication of who may have been responsible.” The Kroll report was 274 pages long. Cornett’s update included 7 PowerPoint slides. This leaves a lot of ground to be covered by city leadership, one would hope that would include those responsible. The sections in the Cornett report: Erroneous Financial Reporting Deleted, Missing and/or Destroyed Records Understaffed Finance Department Lack of Experience/Training in Payroll and General Ledger Division Lack of Training, Skills & Communication Lack of Formal Policies and Procedures MUNIS Accounting & Software Implementation Fluctuations in Finance Department Budget Budget Presentations Lack of Complete and Timely Reconciliations Unaddressed Payroll Issues Summary Cornett described four of the issues addressed in these sections as having been resolved through subsequent actions, marking them as “closed” in her presentation. Among the issues marked as “closed,” however, are the deletion of files that she and the mayor have said were reported to the State’s Attorney General. When asked, William Califf, a spokesman from Attorney General Steve Marshall’s office, said, “It is the longstanding policy of this office to neither confirm nor deny the possibility of an investigation.” The Hoover Channel, the local YouTube channel created by Robin Schultz and his grandson Jackson Schultz, loaded the video of her full update to its page as a part of its newest segment type, “The Week in Review.” You can also find within the description of the video all of the supporting and backup documents, including the detailed PowerPoint presentation that Cornett gave.
Beauty and the Beasts: Jennifer Cornett vs. Hoover City Leadership
Last Monday, the City of Hoover held its regularly scheduled city council meeting, during which the city’s chief financial officer, Jennifer Cornett, spoke. Ordinarily, the CFO would speak when presenting budget updates, during occasional budget amendments (Hoover has had many this year), and giving general operations information. However, Cornett’s first year has been anything but ordinary. In response to a request during a previous council meeting from Councilman Derrick Murphy, Cornett presented an update and plan for remedying some of the concerns raised in the secretly commissioned forensic audit by the nationally renowned firm Kroll. As previously reported by Alabama Today, Cornett, who started with the City of Hoover late last year, has been in a precarious position since day one. By all accounts, including the Kroll forensic audit, the regular auditor BMSS’s regular audits for years, the Gallagher report, and other internal investigations, the city’s financial offices have been understaffed for years due to the mayor’s lack of leadership in requesting funding or managing his staff. As Cornett detailed in her report on Monday, this understaffing and a general lack of accountability and management over the years have led to a host of problems she is now having to clean up. On Monday, as she has every time she’s addressed the Council, she stressed a commitment to transparency and accountability. A commitment that puts her directly at odds with others in city leadership, including Mayor Frank Brocato, who has seemingly, at every turn during this process, denied that problems existed, sought out the least transparent way forward to cover them up, and downplay them, and who, to this day, refuses to acknowledge it was during his tenure and because of his leadership failures that these problems were allowed to happen and remained for years. Cornett’s commitment to good governance is certainly at odds with the public position presented in word and action by City Attorney Phillip Corley, who has sat back as the mayor, mayor’s staff, and City Council President John Lyda declared publically that they are shielded from their actions, words, and failure to act by Corley directing or allowing them to declare “attorney/client privilege” as if it’s a “Get out of Jail” free card in a game of Monopoly. Anyone who has been to council meetings or had any interaction with the council, be it on the forensic audit, asking questions about the Riverwalk Development or costs related to the Certificate of Need hearings, have seen Corley use his Alabama Bar Association membership as both a weapon and a shield to allow himself and everyone around him to avoid transparency and accountability. When he or his friends don’t want to answer a question or an inquiry, Corley declares “it’s privileged.” Again, public records laws and other laws be damned, though we have heard from both the mayor and CFO recently that the attorney general’s office has finally been called to look into what they want to be investigated. In one instance of the questionable use of privilege, Lyda sent an email to the rest of the council seeking approval for the forensic audit, an email that the city failed to produce in a public records request, even though it was just one councilor to others with no legal counsel included. That didn’t stop Corley from withholding said document from a public records request. Finally, Cornett’s pledge is at odds with the Council, which, under Lyda’s leadership, has been all but ambivalent about developing and maintaining the checks and balances required to correct the multitude of problems facing the city. One could only imagine if, rather than the beasts at city hall deflecting blame and responsibility, hiding plans, cutting backroom deals, picking fights with one another, and all the madness we’ve seen in Hoover since early this year, how beautiful, peaceful and productive growing and governing could be.
