Mayor stripped of spending city funds
Monticello council clamps down a week after learning of $22,500 check, invoice
Monticello Mayor Zack Tucker can no longer authorize expenditures for the city, the City Council decided this week.
Additionally, the council’s seven members decided unanimously Tuesday that expenditures of more than $2,000 now require majority approval of the council’s budget committee.
The changes were part of an emergency ordinance approved at Tuesday’s regular council meeting and came a week after city officials learned about a $22,500 check that appeared to be signed by Tucker in April 2015 and accompanied an invoice that had not been approved by city officials.
Tenth Judicial District Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Frank Spain said Wednesday that the Arkansas State Police had opened an investigation into the check and invoice at the request of prosecutor Thomas Deen.
Tucker did not return a message left for him at his office Wednesday. Attempts to reach some of the council members were unsuccessful.
The $2,000 limit is $500 less than the law previously allowed, City Clerk Andrea Chambers said.
Instead of the mayor, a member of the council’s budget committee will now countersign checks, bank drafts, money transfers or other expenditures of city funds, along with the city treasurer. The city finance director will sign off on all of them, according to the ordinance.
The previous city ordinance said any two-person combination of the mayor, the city’s finance director and the city treasurer could sign checks, drafts, transfers or other city funds expenditures.
The budget committee consists of one council member from each of the city’s four wards. Currently on the committee are Claudia Hartness, Joe Meeks and Al Peer. The Ward 4 position is vacant, Chambers said.
The new ordinance begins “Whereas, the City Council of Monticello, Arkansas, has learned that the established fiscal procedures of the City of Monticello have, on occasion, in the past two years, not been followed.”
It ends by noting that “an emergency is declared to exist and this ordinance being necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety of the citizens of Monticello shall be in full force and effect from and after it’s passage.”
The check and invoice were discussed during a meeting last week of the city’s advertising and promotion commission.
Nita McDaniel, executive director of the Economic Development Fund, told the commission — of which she is secretary — that the $22,500 check from the commission to the Economic Development Fund was accompanied by an invoice on the fund’s letterhead. That invoice, she said, was not prepared by the organization nor approved by the commission.
The commission voted to draft a letter to Legislative Audit to submit the matter for review.
The invoice states that $22,500 would be paid to ETC Engineering of Little Rock for half of the work done on the specifications for a proposed city convention center. Voters later rejected the sales tax for that convention center in December 2015. The invoice, Deen said, appears to have been signed by Tucker, who appears also to have signed and endorsed the check. A handwritten note on the invoice reads “From AP per Z Tucker.”
The Economic Development Fund of Monticello is a nonprofit that contracts with the city.
Deen told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette last week that the check was cashed, but who cashed it and where the money ended up is something investigators will have to determine.
He said based on his knowledge of the case, ETC Engineering did not work on the convention center specifications.
Tucker, 27, was elected mayor in 2014 at the age of 25, and was the second-youngest mayor in the city’s history. That year, he was named one of the 20 most influential Arkansans in their 20s by Arkansas Business.
In the past two months, Tucker has faced opposition from Monticello Citizens for Better Government, a group that is attempting to collect enough signatures to hold a recall vote on his mayorship. Tucker is in the second year of his four-year term.