New finance director hits the ground running
LANSDALE >> She’s been on the job for just a few weeks, and is already making changes and fitting right in.
Lansdale’s borough council members got to meet and greet, virtually at least, new Finance Director Melissa Gemelli last week.
“She fits in well with the team we have at the borough. We’re looking forward to working with her, and learning from her about how we can do things more efficiently, and better, for everybody,” said borough Manager John Ernst.
In February Ernst announced that Gemelli had been hired to fill the town’s lead financial position, which had been vacant since Decem
ber 2020 due to the departure of prior director John Ramey. Gemelli started in Lansdale on Feb. 22, and brought roughly two decades of financial experience with the Lehigh and Northampton Transportation Authority, and is a certified CPA and municipal auditor, Ernst told council’s administration and finance committee on Wednesday night.
Gemelli added that she lives in Coopersburg, has twin 18-year-olds “who are in full college mode right now,” enjoys reading and concerts, and has so far enjoyed meeting and greeting borough staff.
“I am overwhelmed by the great welcome that I’ve received, from all of the staff, everyone that I’ve met. It’s overwhelming, how welcome I’ve been made to feel,” she said.
So far, she has begun meeting with town customer service staff to go over their responsibilities, and started talks with Ernst on how to streamline the monthly financial reports given to council and the committee. A first draft at that streamlining was shown to the committee: instead of hundreds of pages of statements, Gemelli showed the committee a spreadsheet listing the 2020 and 2021 figures for seven main borough funds, and the positive or negative changes seen since the prior year.
“You were getting 144 to 150 pages, of every single line item, and you were probably overwhelmed by that information: you see 144 pages, and you don’t want to go through it,” Gemelli said.
“What I’d like to do going forward is provide you with, they’d be unaudited financial statements, basically. It’d be giving you a balance sheet, as well as an income statement,” she said.
Those stats can then be used to build a data dashboard showing the trends in chart or graph form, and Ernst said those tools could be used to show the impact of COVID-19 on the town’s tax revenue.
“At this time last year, we were not in Covid yet. March, April, May is when we were really starting to see some of the impact, but January of last year, we had not really witnessed or experienced anything relating to the Covid impact on the budget,” he said.
Committee chairman Leon Angelichio said he thought the spreadsheets would be “a little easier to digest” than the full reports, so long as council still had access to the full data too.
“Sometimes, you look at an anomalous number, and dig in, and go ‘How did this happen? Where exactly is this?’ It’s nice to have access, but for the purposes of reporting, and being beholden to the taxpayers and residents, the broad overview, first and foremost is extremely important,” he said.
Ernst added that he and borough IT staff could use the reports to build on a budget dashboard first unveiled in fall 2018 as part of talks on the town’s 2019 budget, as another way to make the budget easier to understand.
“That was pie charts, and graphs, and you could actually click on the pie chart and drill into a specific piece of the pie, and bring up more information about that account,” he said.
“We’re going to start moving back in that direction, because it is a much more user-friendly, and visual, piece of information, that will allow council and the public to be able to look at the budget in full transparency,” Ernst said.
Hawkins Charlton volunteered her own expertise as a graphic designer to help with the reports.