Posted on 10/03/2002 4:34:03 AM PDT by ijcr
Broward Supervisor of Elections Miriam Oliphant may have to lay off some employees and make other cutbacks in order to balance her books after overspending last year's $6.4 million budget by $900,800.
Oliphant already has tapped nearly two-thirds of the $1.4 million she received Tuesday at the beginning of the new budget year. (The fiscal year begins Oct. 1 and ends Sept. 30.) Much of that money -- which is 25 percent of Oliphant's new budget -- was used to pay Sept. 10 primary poll workers.
After the November general election, Oliphant's office will have so little money left that layoffs are possible -- especially among the six-person community outreach department Oliphant created in 2001. Those employees, whose salaries add up to $226,678, were added to teach people how to use touch-screen voting machines. Their positions are not funded in the new budget.
''It's possible we'll have to make some adjustments,'' Oliphant acknowledged Wednesday.
Before the Sept. 10 primary, Oliphant's critics speculated she had exceeded her 2002 budget by at least $500,000. Numbers released Wednesday gave the official total as $900,800 -- about 14 percent of the budget.
Oliphant is elected independently, but her office receives most of her budget from the County Commission, including her $122,466 salary. Wednesday, commissioners said they were shocked at the amount of the overrun.
'This is the taxpayers' money she wasted,'' said County Commissioner Sue Gunzburger. ``That's unacceptable and irresponsible.''
Gunzburger suggested putting Oliphant on a multiyear plan to repay the money she overspent.
''There's a lot of money she spent on things that had nothing to do with the election,'' Gunzburger said. ``It means she has to go on an austerity campaign.''
Among the questionable expenses: $264,864 Oliphant spent remodeling election offices, including renovating her office to a space three times larger than the closet-size quarters of her predecessor, Jane Carroll.
County leaders say what disturbs them most is that they don't know where all the overruns came from. They've sent in their auditor, Norm Thabit, to look at the books, but don't know yet what caused the problem, said County Commission Chairwoman Lori Parrish.
''We don't have anything in writing,'' Parrish said.
The audit is expected to look at several areas, including how Oliphant exceeded her total number of budgeted employees by six, as well as money she paid to politically connected consultants with ties to Oliphant's days on the Broward School Board for voter education.
The audit was one of the conditions the county required Oliphant to meet when commissioners agreed to run many aspects of the Nov. 5 election. The agreement also required Oliphant to hire former deputy supervisor Joe Cotter at $105,000 a year to handle the administrative duties of the office.
The county's duties include assigning more than 1,000 people on Election Day to make sure the Nov. 5 election isn't a repeat of the primary mess.
Oliphant, who has made few public statements since the Sept. 10 election, told The Herald on Wednesday she did not learn of the budget overruns until last week, and that she welcomes the audit.
''I take responsibility for what's going on in the office,'' Oliphant said. ``The county and the taxpayers need to know what's going on.''
But she did say that her office encountered many unexpected expenses, including the cost of updating computer servers in her office. Oliphant said she believes her budget was too small for an office converting to sophisticated new voting equipment, as Broward did this year.
''My budget is the budget we had for punch card ballots, not for the technology we have,'' Oliphant said.
Reform -- remodeling -- all the same to a socialist democrat.
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