Yep, it’s there again, on myvaresources.com. There have been 3 finance committee meetings thus far and while I was unable to attend and video tape 2 of those meetings, I did obtain the documents provided to the Finance Committee and posted them to my website. You can find all of the documents at: http://myvaresources.com/Town%20of%20Cburg/CburgAuditFinance.htm.
While you are there, take a few minutes to look at the 2009 Budget documents which also have links on that same page. You will discover some near miraculous changes between the documents. This year, for the first time anyone knows of, there are details on how money is raised, how it is spent, and what it is spent on.
Why this sudden change? Well, last year Councilmembers Barber and Carter (both on the Finance Committee) both pushed hard to generate a new position and to find someone who was highly competent to fill that position. They succeeded. Personally, I think this is the greatest achievement either of them could manage to pull off.
Val Tweedie, the new Finance Officer, has done yeoman’s duty in preparing the information necessary for a clear and understandable presentation. Ms. Tweedie even chose to come to Christiansburg after being faced with such scare tactics as being warned that ‘we have bloggers here’!
Way to go Ms. Carter, Mr. Barber, and Ms. Tweedie. Glad to see the big, bad bloggers didn’t scare you away!
(I can’t wait to see what she does when it comes time to work on some grants. The details in her reports show that she clearly knows her stuff! Too bad this wasn’t done 10 years ago.)
By the way, when you look at the details and see where money is going, don’t freak out. That money has been going out for years without anyone being aware of the purpose for which it was used. There is really not much of anything there that hasn’t been boxed up in unidentified clusters previously.
The budget process is never easy. It requires careful consideration of the needs and the resources of the town. It is the Finance Committee, the Finance Officer, the Town Manager, the Assistant Town Manager, and various Department Heads that have to do the tough work of deciding what stays and what goes in order to keep the budget balanced. Waiting until April to begin this process must have made the task even harder (most jurisdictions begin this anew shortly after the new budget is enacted). Who knows, maybe next year the process will not only be much improved in information but given more time to fine tune things.
