County administrator to make major changes to ‘stressful’ budget process
.jpeg "County Administrator Ashley Jacobs")
Wednesday marked Ashley Jacobs’ 100th day as the new Beaufort County administrator.
“The first 100 days are always the hardest,” Jacobs told the Bluffton Regional Business Council Thursday.
Jacobs, who became the county’s first female administrator on April 15, addressed about 100 local business and government leaders at a coffee talk in Bluffton held by the Hilton Head Island-Bluffton Chamber of Commerce. She spoke about her career as a public official and her future goals and plans for the county. Being a public servant is part of her DNA, she said.
Her most candid statements, however, addressed the county’s current financial process — a process that “is not very good.”
When she first came to Beaufort County, Jacobs said she asked Chief Financial Officer Alicia Holland how far along officials were on the budget, thinking they’d be nearly finished. They hadn’t even started, she was told. Jacobs and County Council scrambled to complete the budget — calculating expenditures and approving appropriations — in just two months.
This fiscal year, things are going to change. Jacobs says she’s going to work with council on a new structure where proposals are reviewed in January and the budget is projected in February — five months before it’s due in June.
She said she plans to create a budget document that lists each expenditure and appropriation online to keep the public aware of where tax money is going. The closest thing the county has to a budget document is its financial transparency website. However, a recent investigation by The Island Packet showed that some of the expenditure numbers for the fund on the site were off by tens of thousands of dollars, and portions of the site were incomplete.
During the budget process, several council members raised concerns over the administrator’s spending power — specifically regarding a government account that in previous years had provided administrators with more than $300,000 in discretionary spending. Jacobs agreed that number was too high and cut her contingency account by $115,301 — more than half — for fiscal year 2020. Council members say they hope Jacobs can address some of the issues they’ve had with previous administrations.
This story was originally published July 27, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
