office budgets

your tax dollars – even in the smallest corners of el paso city hall. we wanted to find out how the mayor and city representatives are spending their office budget. our maria garcia went through hundreds of financial transactions and has this investigation…. — only on abc-7: 1-11-1:30 3:28 04:22 i don’t want to burden my budget any more than i have to so we’ve become very frugal all the city reps say they’re careful about spending on their p- card. p-cards are debit cards that have replaced petty cash. each of them has one – and so does their administrative assistant. 01:36 you know it’s very expensive to issue purchase orders for everything that the city does. so the p card actually facilitates small purchases. small purchases that can turn into significant amounts. i went through every single p card purchase by city reps and their staff for calender year 2015. spending the least: city rep peter svarzbein. his office spent about 21- hundred dollars on mostly office supplies. we try to be very careful and make sure we only spend on things we need. next is city rep. claudia ordaz at about 36-hundred dollars. larry romero’s office spent 59-hundred dollars. michiel noe at 69-hundred. carl robinson 99-hundred dollars. lily limon – almost 17- thousand dollars. emma acosta: 18-thosuand dollars. and topping the list: cortney niland at almost 20-thousand dollars. 04:43 we do review these items in the office of the comptroller routinely my careful review of the purchases does show the city reps spent the money mostly on putting on big community events. some city reps raise private donations to help cover the costs. for example: out of acosta’s 18 thousand dollars, 12-thousand was used to put on movies at the park. most of which was covered through private donations she raised. 01:58 because i don’t have enough funds for it 02:20 some of those events can cost up to 1500 or 2000 dollars so you can see how these events can easily those funds can be eaten to pretty quickly. niland’s expenditures – the highest of the bunch – also revolved mostly around big events – like neighborhood association block parties and movies at the park. but we also noticed her previous administrative assistant paid his 255 dollar personal cell phone bill with the city p card. when we asked about it – her office said he accidently used the wrong card – and showed us a receipt that showed he paid the city back that same day – with a five dollar fee. 00:17 every month we’re required to reconcile our exenditures back that up with receipts and verification and tehn we have to send it to not only the internal auditor but also to the cfo 05:29 there’s a really a good system of checks and balances 05:05 if we ever do a presentation of the keys to the city and those are quite expensive those can run like $150 city rep lily limon – the third highest – spends her funds mostly on recognitions, a disc golf club for children in her district and treats for constituents. 01:55 when children come and recite the pledge of allegiance for us, we develop goodie bags we did notice some big food purchases – more than 100 dollars at a time. when we asked – city reps said they were taking turns buying food for each other every council meeting but scrutiny of other boards made them think twice. 02:53 i believe you all did a story on school boards and how much was spent on the meals. we pretty much came to the agreement that if that was an item that was of concern to the community then we should stop keeping an eye on even the smallest expenditures of taxpayer money. mg abc-7. we reviewed the calendar year. but every fiscal year – city reps get 11-thousand dollars in office and discretionary funds – which is what pays for p-card purchases. we checked and none have gone over budget. what about the mayor? our maria garcia broke that down on kvia.com. just click on this story a socorro city rep has resigned. sergio