Valencia Has $1M In Unpaid Bills

Valencia County has nearly $1 million in bills that have gone unpaid, in some cases for years.

“We’ve had to reallocate funds in the budget to pay these old expenditures,” County Manager Bruce Swingle said. “I can’t say why they weren’t paid, they just weren’t.”

Swingle said some employees’ federal withholdings were not calculated properly as far back as 2007 and as recently as 2010. There is an IRS lien against the county for the miscalculated federal withholdings, Swingle said, for just under $30,000.

During a County Commission budget workshop in May, staff disclosed that the county’s unemployment premium jumped from $9,000 to $181,000 because the premium went unpaid last year due to a “lack of available funds.” The premium has since gone down to $150,000.

Because there’s no money in the budget for old expenditures, Swingle met with each department head and asked them all to cut 5 percent from their operational costs, pulling $1 million out of budgeted expenditures to cover the unpaid bills.

“Unfortunately, we are finding a lot of unpaid bills,” he said. “I really don’t know what happened. What I think is since the county really only has a set amount of money for operations, when expenses extended beyond that amount or were about to, some bills weren’t paid.

“But what happened for sure, we just don’t know.”

Another expense was revealed when the county submitted its budget to the state’s Department of Finance and Administration. DFA found that the required one-twelfth for road funds had not been established. Swingle said the county is looking at about $227,000 it needs to set aside.

Monday afternoon, Swingle authorized the transfer of $1.5 million from county investments into the general fund to help with the cash flow problem.

“We were hoping not to do that, but things were getting too close,” he said. “We are still exercising the same precautions. This just gives us a little more money to work with until the taxes start to come in.”