WAUSAU, Wis. (WSAU) — Wausau’s finance committee will be looking at improving the city’s bidding and purchasing procedures at tonight’s meeting.
Alderman and committee chair Keene Winter says this is not involved with his complaint over merit pay in the city. “Completely separate audit on other issues. We’ve had four major transactions that have gone bad.” Winter says the city’s staff fouled up a number of projects that put the city in a bad position. The committee will be reviewing a partial audit of the city’s accounting records by Schneck and Associates.
Wausau finance committee chairman Keene Winters says the primary offense in his mind is the way the Stewart Avenue Birds project was handled. “We had staff sending out emails to Revi Construction to submit serial invoices for the Stewart Avenue median project so it wouldn’t look like the project was over $25,000 and needed to be bid.” That incident lead to the resignation of former public works director Brad Marquardt. His replacement is set to be appointed and hired tonight at Wausau’s city council meeting.
Winters says there are a number of other things he’s looking at. “We had an illegal $400,000 no bid contract for public works project on Arlington Lane, a sole source purchase in which the staff made one purchase before they requested approval and three more before approval was granted.”
A preliminary report from the firm says that the city’s finance department has done an excellent job in reducing accidental double payments, and that out of the samples they gathered, all of the issues have been quickly rectified. The firm says that most of those were simple error and were fixed soon afterwards.
The final recommendations say the city council and the department heads should work on improving their understanding of internal controls and procedures in order to make sure city staff knows those methods will be used from the top down and should improve communication of proper city policies.
The committee will take up the report at tonight’s meeting at 5pm.
