ASHLEY TERRY
The city of Pelican Bay has never been able to afford a chief financial officer — until now.
After two years of trying to sell the properties at 1525 and 1529 Pelican Drive, city council members unanimously approved a bid from Factory Showcase Homes Jan. 13 — leaving the city with an extra $120,000 in the bank.
“This is the volunteer fire station and the property right next door,” Mayor Tamra Olague said. “For two years now, we’ve been trying to get it sold.”
While the city received two bids for the properties, the bid from Factory Showcase Homes was about $10,000 more for each property — and the owners are two prominent brothers in the area.
“We all know who the Riggle brothers are,” Olague said. “These are the brothers that have come into the city, and they’re buying up all these older, dilapidated mobile homes and pulling them out, and then bringing brand new ones in. Then they sell those houses. They’re not rental; they’re being sold as real property, which increases the property taxes that we get off of those homes as they’re coming in.”
After council members unanimously approved the bid from Terry and Darrel Riggle, Olague said the city now has enough money to contract with financial analysis firm ZacTax for its virtual CFO services.
“We have never been able to afford a CFO,” Olague said. “We’ve never had anyone working here who had any degree in finance. We have one lady who was here for a few months and had a degree in finance, but came in, saw how much we couldn’t pay her and she left. Our big problem with getting a financial officer in here is we don’t have the money to pay them.”
Olague said while the city had previously contracted with a certified public accountant last year, no training was offered to city staff — leaving many still lacking in terms of financial knowledge.
“All we got from the CPA was what we gave them. I mean, in other words, if you call and ask a question, they don’t answer it; they just do the work,” Olague said. “A lot of what we lack is training — municipal, financial training — and this organization not only does the work but also offers the training.”
Mayor Pro Tem David Dryden described ZacTax as a “fractional CEO,” meaning the city will only be offered financial services on a part-time basis.
“You get all of this knowledge, but you don’t have to buy the whole apple,” Dryden said. “They’re a phenomenal company and (there’s) very intelligent people running it because of the quality of work they do. Their original business was basically calculating sales tax for cities and helping them make decisions on that kind of stuff, so it’s grown since then.”
Through ZacTax, Olague said the city has two different package options it can choose from: CFO services only for an additional $20,000 to the budget or combining CFO services and the monthly budget preparation, which would cost the city an additional $28,000.
“Cynthia (Daniels) and I really both would like to do the package that offers the budget on this session,” Olague said. “It’s not because we don’t know how to do a budget. We know how to do a budget — but they know how to do a municipal budget.”
While the city can cancel the service at any time, Olague recommended the council to at least continue the contract through the budget session so staff can receive the necessary training.
“I like this, too, because it puts another set of eyes on our books,” she said. “We’re all about transparency and if we’re doing something wrong and we don’t know it, we can’t fix it. If we don’t have somebody with the right eyes telling us, ‘Hey, you can’t do it this way,’ we don’t know that.”
Because the city doesn’t have extra money in the budget to fund the CFO services, Olague presented two additional options for the council: use the funds from the $120,000 land sale or take out money from the city’s reserves.
“Right now, between both the general fund and the utility fund, we have $888,886.70 in reserves,” Olague said. “We have drawn $14,000 in interest just over the few months that we’ve invested the money, so our reserves are making us money … It makes no difference to me if you will allow us to use it from reserves, or if you want us to use it from the sale of the land.”
With the city only having three months’ worth of reserves — and not having any other use set aside for the $120,000 — Dryden suggested the council use the money from the sale of the land.
“Let’s leave the reserves alone,” he said. “That’s my opinion to the council.”
With no further discussion, Place 4 Alderman Matt Gassen made a motion to approve the contract with ZacTax for virtual CFO services and the monthly budget preparation using proceeds from the sale of the properties for a total of $28,000. Following a second from Place 3 Alderman Tracy Melton, the motion passed unanimously.
