Stewardship

On Tuesday, November 28, Goochland’s Board of Supervisors got some good news. It held a special meeting to hear the presentation of the  county’s certified annual financial report for fiscal year 2017, which ended on June 30. Mike Garber, a principal of PBMARES, of Harrisonburg, the county’s auditor, announced that this year’s CAFR was clean. One more audit without any material misstatements, and Goochland will no longer be considered a high risk auditee.

Fiscal anomalies discovered nine years ago in the county’s utility department were the first revelations of abysmal disregard of proper internal controls and generally accepted accounting practices. The CAFR for fiscal 2010 contained 40 material restatements. The following year, the county treasurer was convicted of embezzling county funds and went to prison.

In January 2012, the current board took office and worked with County Administrator Rebecca Dickson to dig Goochland out of the hole in which it found itself. A reworking of the massive debt incurred to build infrastructure for the Tuckahoe Creek Service District utility project helped to stabilize county finances.  By 2015, Goochland had earned a AAA Standard and Poor’s bond rating, a rare achievement for a jurisdiction with fewer than 25,000 people.

The county and school division have also received awards for the high quality of their budget documents during the same period. No more wondering what local government is doing with our tax dollars. Budgets, CAFRS, check registers, and credit card statements are all on the county website for inspection.

The 2017 CAFR represents an untold amount of hard work and dedication by officials elected and appointed, and all members of the county and school division staff  every day. All of this effort has helped restore public trust in the management of  local government resources—stewardship—perhaps the most important task of elected officials.

Available in its entirety on the county website http://goochlandva.us/ under the financial services section of the “your government” tab, the 2017 CAFR, and those of the previous five years, are well worth a look. Even if you are not interested in the “weeds” of the numbers, they all contain a great deal of interesting information about the county and its finances.

Engaged citizens are a vital component of good government.