PARKING REVENUE PANIC
Revere councilors call for feds to find missing $92G
Revere city councilors want state and federal authorities to examine City Hall’s books for irregularities and possible crimes after a contentious hearing about $92,000 in missing parking revenues exploded into shouting matches between the mayor and councilors.
“Public corruption cases need the feds,” At-Large Councilor Dan Rizzo insisted during the meeting yesterday.
The council cast a preliminary vote of 8-1 on AtLarge Councilor George Rotondo’s motion to bring in the feds and the state auditor at the end of an hourlong meeting about the missing parking fees. Two parking enforcement officers have been suspended without pay as the police department and the Suffolk District Attorney’s Office investigate.
“They have the ability to deal with this on the forensic level,” said Rotondo, who proposed the motion to call upon the state auditor to look into “each and every department.”
The hearing followed a private audit the city commissioned that identified revenue discrepancies and other issues in the city’s Department of Parking.
“The parking department is broken,” Mayor Brian Arrigo told the council.
Revere police Lt. Maria Lavita told the council the department can’t answer any questions about the ongoing investigation.
Arrigo said the city may have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue through city employees pocketing meter fares over the course of the past 10 years or more.
“Shrinkage — which is a nice accounting word for stealing — was occurring at the same pace,” Arrigo said. “This is decades of mismanagement in this department. This is decades of lack of control.”
Arrigo told the Herald after the meeting that it’s “up to the law-enforcement folks to figure out” whether the feds should get involved.
When pressed by the Herald, Arrigo refused to name the employees on leave.
Though Rizzo said he wants the feds and state auditor to look at the books, both he and Rotondo questioned whether the suspended employees are responsible, disputing the mayor’s repeated assertions that a crime had been committed.
“I think these two people are essentially scapegoats,” Rizzo told the Herald, saying he thinks this is simply a case of accounting and oversight incompetence. “The mayor and his team just can’t count coins.”
Arrigo and Rizzo, a former mayor, got into several loud arguments that required council President Jessica Giannino to bang her gavel repeatedly and yell at them before the meeting could continue.
“Gentlemen, my God, we’re going to keep this in a respectful way,” she told them at one point after the rivals began leaving the topic at hand to trade political barbs. “We are not making this a personal political issue.”
CliftonLarsonAllen returned an audit and a scathing review of Revere’s parking services last month after the city paid the firm $72,000 to check into its operations. The firm identified various issues with the meters, including revenue flatlining over the past few years, with literally no money coming in during 18 of the previous 24 months.
The audit found $2.2 million in unused funds sitting in 86 dormant city accounts.
Rotondo’s resolution, voted through by a committee-of-the-whole, will be up for a final vote at a future full council meeting. The next one is Aug. 27.