The County Commissioners are required by statute to publish payments by the county (not including salaries) on a monthly basis. The statute requires that the published report include the name of the payee, amount, and a description of the material or services furnished to the county. A record of warrants paid must be published in the legal paper within 30 days of the close of each month.

The Park County Bulletin chose June of 2008 as a test sample and listed all expenditures as published by the BOCC. Some of the payments, when organized from the published list, showed some interesting patterns.

First, the county paid reimbursements of travel expenses to commissioners Tighe and Walker (no reimbursement to District 3), other elected officials and county employees over and above the cars that the county has voted to provide for free. Each Bailey commissioner has the free use of a car for their personal commute to work in addition to travel for county business. A recent report lists 124 cars in the county "pool" with some dedicated for the use of only one person and others available for fleet use. However, the county spent nearly $4,000 in the month of June to reimburse travel expenses. If annualized, that would total $48,000 for the year not including the cost of operating all of the vehicles owned by the government.

More startling is the large amount that the county paid in the month of June and labeled "Miscellaneous Expense" possibly failing to meet the requirements of the statute to define the type of product or service received. Over 40% of the General Fund expenditures ($139,654) in the month of June 2008 were only described as "MISC EXP" with no other explanation offered.

County personnel charged $137,374.56 to a county credit card and did not publish what purchases were made on the Visa account or by whom or for what. The entire amount of the payment of the bancard expenditures were simply labeled as "MISC EXP." In the accounting world, payment by bancard is considered a cash payment from a credit account and should be reported by the county as any other cash payment listing each charge by name of person or company receiving the cash from the bank card account and the reason for the payment. The county may have skirted this requirement of the statute.

We will continue to organize random published reports to bring to the attention of our fellow taxpayers. Please join discussion here: Discussion of Miscellaneous Expense