GETTING THE FACTS
By Stephen Koff Politifact Ohio
When you want a job promotion, it helps to demonstrate success in your cur- rent position. Aftab Pureval wants voters to promote him to Congress.
To get that job, he’d have to oust an incumbent in Ohio’s 1st Congressional District, which includes all of Warren County and parts of the Cincinnati area.
Does he deserve the job? Not at all, says the i nc u mb e nt, Repub l ican U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot. As proof, Chabot cites a “projected $400,000 deficit” in Pureval’s current office as the Hamilton County clerk of courts. It was the first deficit projection in years, Chabot’s campaign says, showing that the challenger can’t even handle his current job.
Pureval, who grew up in Beavercreek, disputes the claim. But his denial prompted a counterclaim in a Chabot ad that started airing Sept. 6. In the ad, an announcer says, “Aft- ab’s lying about his office’s $400,000 projected deficit.”
Was there a projected deficit? If it was projected, did the numbers come in as expected? Was the clerk of courts responsible for this gap? And did Chabot charac- terize the budget accurately?
The answers offer a look into the budget complexities of Ohio county government and the perils of shoehorning an attack into a 30-second TV ad. of the office,” Cody Rizzuto, Chabot’s campaign spokesman, told PolitiFact. In two years, he said, Pureval has “turned it into a deficit operation.”
No deficit, clerk’s office says
Pureval’s campaign say there will be no deficit. It forwarded a memo from Rene Cheatham, the chief financial officer in the clerk’s office, to Pureval saying as much. The Sept. 6 memo said, “After discussions with Hamilton County’s budget and finance departments, we have revised projections” for the general fund.
Now the clerk’s projected revenue for the fund is $12.67 million. The projected expenditures are now $12.47 million, the memo says. Viewed this way, the numbers show a surplus.
“As confirmed by Hamilton County, there is no projected deficit for the Clerk’s office,” Cheatham, who works for Pureval, wrote in a memo.
Pureval campaign manager Sarah Topy added in an email to PolitiFact: “Let me be absolutely clear that there is no deficit at the Clerk’s office — there never was and there never has been. The Cincinnati Enquirer even wrote a correction that made that point and that also pointed out (correctly) that Aftab Pureval has noth- ing to do with the revenue generation from the courts.”
T he newspaper’s correction was a result of a
July 7 guest column that said Pureval “inherited The clerk of court mana clerk’s office that ages a lot of the administra- had been operattive functions of local courts, ing with multimilincluding collection of fines lion dollar surand fees. pluses for at least 10 years.
The clerk has a staff to pay In just over a year, he has and administrative office turned those surpluses into expenses that require money. a roughly half-million dolThat’s the expense side. lar deficit.”
T he clerk’s office has The correction, an unusual historically taken in more five paragraphs, said Pureval money than needed to cover is projected to be under budits expenses, so it has turned get in 2018, “which is a savover the surplus to help the ings to taxpayers.” county take care of other needs.
But a set of Hamilton County general fund budget projections for 2018 showed a recorded shortfall of more than $500,000: $12.023 mil- lion in projected revenue but $12.532 million in expenses.
That was according to Hamilton County Administrator Jeff Alluotto’s budget recommendation to county commissioners presented on Oct. 16, 2017. Those projections were the basis for Chabot’s claim.
Considering previous surpluses in the clerk’s office and Pureval’s time in the office so far, two years, “I think it’s mismanagement
Pureval’s clerk budget Start making sense
How can these figures and interpretations differ so dramatically?
Cheatham and other county officials walked us through it, but we also found it in quarterly county budget documents and other records. Two reasons explain the dif- ference. First, money coming into Pureval’s office has little to do with how he operates, because it “is all driven by fees and fines,” Budget Direc- tor John P. Bruggen told us. “It’s stuff that has nothing to do with the day-to-day oper- ation of the clerk’s office.”
Second, the general fund — the one that Chabot said shows Pureval had a propassport processing. The jected deficit and was “lying” office has been talking about about it — is not the entirety adding new locations. In the of the clerk’s budget. It is the long run, the thinking was, major part, and it is called the expansion would more the “general fund” because than pay for itself. it is integrated into the counThat’s a big reason the ty’s overall budget or general clerk’s general fund showed fund, available for transfers a gap. This was confirmed in in and out of other departcounty budget documents. ments as county budget offi- The documents for 2018 said cials deem necessary if it the clerk’s auto title fund was shows a surplus. “anticipating an increase in
But the clerk also has a total balance by year end.” so-called restricted fund, This would mean, the county with money coming from documents said, “a decrease auto-title transfer fees. The in the General Fund transclerk operates title offices fer by $1 million.” to collect these fees. Under Those plans changed, Ohio law, this money need however. not be transferred to the general fund, although typi- cally money not needed for operating the title operations is. In 2017, for example, the clerk’s office transferred $1.7 million from this restricted fund to the general fund, therefore boosting the clerk’s overall general-fund balance and helping pay for other county needs.
This year was going to be different, and that’s why it looked like the clerk’s general fund was going into the red.
Pureval wanted to use more of the auto title fund in the short term to “drive more revenue” for the long term by boosting auto titling and other business, espe- cially for customers outside of the downtown area, Cheatham said. A number of auto dealers have showrooms in exurban areas bordering other counties, and if those dealerships find it more con- venient to transfer titles in those other counties, Hamilton County doesn’t get the fee, Cheatham said.
So for 2018, the clerk’s office planned to transfer only $700,000 from this restricted fund to the general fund, and to spend more of the restricted fund on such things as expanded hours,
Saturday operations and
How these tie together
Instead of planning to transfer $700,000 from the restricted fund to the general fund this year, Pureval’s office this summer decided to transfer an additional $700,000, for a total of $1.4 million. The expansion of hours, new services and title offices is ongoing, Cheatham said, but it is occurring in a way that allows for a bigger transfer to the county this year. Doing so makes stra- tegic sense, he said.
But it also changed projec- tions for the general fund, removing what Chabot called a “deficit.”
This decision was discussed internally in July and formally made in August. It is true that in earlier Hamil- ton County budget updates, issued in April and July, the clerk’s general fund still showed a projected gap. And Chabot’s campaign noticed that a public announcement and memo from Pureval’s office — an announcement with updated general fund figures and the statement that there is no deficit — was only issued on Sept. 6, right as Chabot was making his campaign claim. Pureval’s t iming was suspicious, Chabot’s campaign said.
“He’s just fiddling with numbers to protect against a political attack,” said Riz- We are now working with PolitiFact, a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. We will check into what they say and tell you whether it’s true.
zuto. Rizzuto called it “absolute corruption” for a county official running for Congress to make a decision involving county funds when attacked, considering “he could have done this six months ago.” Furthermore, Rizzuto said, the county commissioners will have to approve any such transfer at the end of the year, and there’s no guarantee they will.
But there’s something Chabot’s campaign apparently missed: The decision to make the transfer from the auto title fund, as well as the necesessary legal approval from Hamiton County commissioners, all had been made earlier.
PolitiFact had to do some digging and request internal records in order to confirm this, but those records show that the clerk’s office sent a transmittal form to the county auditor’s office in order to initiate the transfer on Aug. 2. The county commissioners, a board on which Chabot once served, then approved the transfer at their public meeting on Aug. 29. Jacqueline Panioto, the clerk for the board of county commissioners, confirmed this and pointed us to the board meeting’s minutes where it was recorded.
Each of these actions — the discussions to make the transfer and the approval for the transfer — occurred before Chabot made his claim.
Our ruling
Steve Chabot says Aftab Pureval’s is “lying” about his office’s “$400,000 projected deficit.”
If you’ve read this far, you no doubt understand this is a tricky claim. Some budget documents showed the Hamilton County clerk of courts office with a projected shortfall of actually more than $500,000, but the county’s budget director said the deficit was really only on paper. It was also a temporary projection. As explained above, Pureval’s office — in agreement with other offices including the county commissioners’ — had wiped out the projected general fund gap well before Chabot made his ad.
It’s complex stuff. But Chabot is a congressman and a former Hamilton County commissioner.
We rate his claim False.
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