When will Galion get out of fiscal emergency?
No clear answers are known.
City and state officials met Wednesday during a Financial Planning and Supervision Commission meeting to discuss the latest progress on the matter.
Belinda Miller, the city’s Financial Supervisor, said the decision won’t come quickly due to a lack of progress from the city.
“The city makes too many accounting errors,” she said. “(It should take a couple of hours to review), but it took three days to get through the (Galion’s) financial report because of the errors that are being made.”
But Galion officials were concerned about a lack of details given from the state on the amount of errors and who is making them.
“The (pressure) of looking at state requirements, looking at each month’s end reconciliation and seeing where the differences are,” Galion Mayor Tom O’Leary said.
O’Leary said the state has said the city’s last barriers to get out of fiscal emergency are to keep a clean monthly reconciliation and track record for over four to six months, but is frustrated because Galion hasn’t received clear feedback on its performance.
“What are these errors that are being made?” he said. “(The department who is making the mistake) needs to assume the responsibility for their reconciliation.”
O’Leary said the city will be able to better address accounting issues with detailed feedback from the state.
“We have look at the specific problems in each month’s reconciliation,” he said. “We need to examine the details where those issues have been caused, work to correct them and make changes in each department’s side to make it easier for the auditor.”