Now that former Director Maurice McDowell has scooped up his severance package and left, the full scale of financial mismanagement at the Parks and Recreation Department is beginning to come to light.
It is already known that McDowell spent $26,210 on hotel rooms with no corresponding travel receipts.
The department controls what appears on paper to be over 80 separate bank accounts, but this can be misleading. All departments have one overall budget, and expenditures are tracked using a key code.
Official city guidelines give department directors discretion over how to allocate funding unless the funding is project specific.
Former Augusta Commissioner and accountant Jerry Brigham says the many spreadsheets are really “virtual sub-accounts” that can easily be mismanaged or manipulated, baffling the best of auditors.
“If you are spending money and moving the expenses around to different ledgers, then it would take months, maybe years, of comparing spreadsheets to find what you’re looking for, if you ever find it,” Brigham said.
One reason it took time to compile the full amount of what McDowell spent on hotel rooms was because the transactions were imputed under different key codes across the spectrum.
For example, Lake Olmstead Stadium has been abandoned and supposedly mothballed for two years. The city budgeted $32,500 a year to maintain the ailing property; yet, according to the Parks and Rec. financial records, $93,733 has been spent at the facility over the past two years.
The ledger belonging to key code 10106489, or Lake Olmstead Stadium, shows an outlay of $5,335 on new carpet, $5,000 to local motivational speaker Chris Singleton, $15,480 on porta potties, $36,862 on school uniforms and sports equipment and $6,516 for a locksmith.
While all the locks at the stadium were apparently changed, vandals simply found another way in by busting out the windows.
In 2022, the Augusta Commission gave the department $850,000 in American Rescue Act funds on top of the $588,410 annual budget for Riverwalk.
Out of that funding, the department did spend $2,601 on an electrician; however, that was a far cry from the $150,000 that was projected in the budget as needed for the Eighth Street Bulkhead alone.
The financial records, which are readily available online, show that $2,200 was paid to Road Safe, a company that paints the white and yellow lines on roadways and parking lots, however, Riverwalk does not have a paved parking lot; $885 for kitchen equipment when there is no kitchen on premises as well as $979 for batteries, $8,895 to Schindler Elevator Service and $19,356 worth of expenses at Walmart.
Despite spending $48,775 for the services of Raftel Financial Consultants, with the exception of $6,755 paid to a brick masonry company, no line items in either of the two key codes for Riverwalk show anything that resembles money spent on capital improvement.
There is also quite a bit of duplication in services throughout the key codes.
While the budget for the Parks and Recreation Department contains allocations for a janitorial staff on the premises, nearly every community center and Lake Olmstead Stadium key codes have checks payable to private janitorial companies.
Instead of washing county vehicles in-house, the Parks and Recreation Department paid Clean Auto LLC $23,230 for their services.
The department spent $67,395 on one lawn service company alone, even though the department has an army of landscapers on the payroll and the use of RCCI inmates. Checks written to outdoor-equipment companies such as Granger show that the department is fully stocked with tools and hardware.
Some of the financial entries for accounts seem unrelated to activities that are possible in the space. Some parks are little more than a field with a playground. Brookfield Park is one of those parks that does not have electricity or Wi-Fi, and yet the account shows $1,207 spent on AT&T charges.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter and Editorial Page Editor for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
