Curry County’s finance director used a scatalogical expletive to describe the knot she and the county treasurer had to untangle to answer a federal inquiry about unaccounted for COVID relief dollars.
Keina Wolf told commissioners Wednesday she and Curry County Treasurer Nick Vicino spent the final hours of 2024 addressing an email from the US Department of Treasury stating that out of a total of about $4.4 million in American Rescue Plan money, only $1.734 million had been accounted for.
Wolf, who became Curry County’s finance director in February 2024, had taken exception to a public commenter who asked how she could have missed the un-accounted for balance of about $2.7 million.
“There were dozens of transactions that were not accounted for that we had to write off,” she said, placing the blame on her predecessor and the previous treasurer. “That is not my fault. I take no responsibility to the prior people in the department that had the inability to do their jobs. Or maybe they just didn’t give a damn one way or the other. That’s what happened.”
But the county’s previous treasurer, David Barnes said the Treasurer’s Office isn’t responsible for managing grants or reporting them. When Curry County first received ARP dollars, then-finance director Brad Rueckert administered that account until he left and Frank Jerome became finance director, Barnes told Redwood Voice Community News on Monday.
ARP funds were meant to provide relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the former treasurer, the Board of Commissioners created a system where local organizations would apply for a portion of those dollars. The BOC received about a dozen applications, Barnes said.
Barnes said when he retired in April 2024, he submitted a report to the Board of Commissioners, notifying them that $2.6 million in ARP dollars had not been allocated yet. How those dollars get allocated isn’t the treasurer’s responsibility, he said, but falls under the purview of the county finance director.
“The new treasurer sat next to me at his computer and we did this report and he was aware that there was $2.6 million that we had not allocated to anything yet,” Barnes said. “If they made a phone call to me I could have answered this question and it never would have been a problem. I don’t understand why this is an issue.”
At a Dec. 19 Board of Commissioners meeting, Wolf said that when she arrived at the county in February 2024, 26-month-old deposits had not been entered into the county’s fiscal system. The county still owed pass-through tax revenue to other small agencies, had made about $30 million in bank adjustments and recorded $3 million to the wrong funds, “misstating other balances and other funds.”
On Jan. 9, Wolf told the Board of Commissioners that Vicino had received an email from the U.S. Department of Treasury informing him that if the county didn’t account for the $2.7 million in unallocated ARP dollars, it would have to return those funds.
“Apparently there were two separate deposits of equal amounts that came in, and this goes back to 2021 and 2022,” she said. “I was under the impression, and Nick was under the impression, that these were spent down. In less than 24 hours Nick and I had to justify the funds to the U.S. Department of Treasury because we do not have $2.7 million to return to them.”
According to Wolf, Vicino completed a report to the Treasury Department stating that the county would use the unaccounted-for funds as lost revenue dollars. She said those dollars could be spent on personal protective equipment, sanitary items and any other COVID-related expenses the county paid for front-line workers during the pandemic.
In 2024, more than $500,000 in ARP dollars were used to help Curry County through a ransomware attack that crippled its network, according to Vicino.
Wolf said she and Vicino are going back to 2021 to try to figure out where those ARP dollars were allocated to and why they weren’t recorded.
“We really have to unravel this from 2021 to current on these dollars because we were under the impression they were all spent,” she said. “We’ve got to figure this out.”’
In an email Monday evening, Barnes pointed Redwood Voice to an item the Board of Commissioners considered on May 16, 2024 to allocate up to $1.2 million to the recording division of the Curry County Clerk’s Office. This money was to be used to restore digital files that were lost due to the 2023 ransomware attack.
According to Barnes, that $1.2 million accounts for nearly 45 percent of the missing $2.7 million.
However, while the Board did vote to transfer ARP dollars to the County Clerk’s Office, the allocation was for $500,000, according to the May 16, 2024 agenda packet. Since it was a proposal included in the Board’s consent agenda, commissioners approved it without comment.
In his email, Barnes said that allocation wasn’t included in a report he made to the U.S. Treasury’s Office on April 24, 2024 since it occurred after his last day with the county.
“I will not conjecture why the US Treasury report was not updated with this info,” he told Redwood Voice.
On Jan. 9, Commissioner Jay Trost said if $2-plus million were available to the county, it would be a gut punch after budget cuts it had to make in June 2024.
His colleague Brad Alcorn agreed.
“This was a mistake made by someone else and it’s a mistake that has affected a lot of people’s lives,” Alcorn said.
In June 2024, after a law enforcement tax levy failed, Curry County was forced to reorganize departments and layoff about 17 employees to address a $3.8 million general fund deficit.
On Monday, however, Ted Fitzgerald, the county’s director of operations and legal counsel, said there may not be $2.7 million in ARP dollars left for the county to spend. In fact, he said, he believed the county spent more than the total $4.4 million it received by about $30,000 to $40,000.
According to Fitzgerald, the rules about how ARP dollars could be spent were stricter in the beginning. Then those rules became more relaxed and the county could put it to a variety of uses.
“The major problem was how [that money] was accounted for to the federal government,” he said. “The money came in and half was kept track of and declared to the federal government that it had been used properly and the remaining half was sort of dropped.”
Fitzgerald said the county is looking into how it should respond to the previous treasurer’s actions. He said he informed Barnes when he was still in office that he was in violation of his obligations under Oregon statute, but it “just kind of fell on deaf ears.”
“I think as we go forward a lot more will become clear regarding the nature and extent of any sort of aggregation of duties as we go through this audit,” he said, adding that much of the audit would be performed in-house, though eventually a third party will need to look at the county’s finances.
Barnes, however, said he introduced himself and Vicino, who was his deputy, to Wolf during her first week on the job and met with her to “let her know what was going on.” During that meeting, Barnes said, Fitzgerald stormed into the room and forbade him from speaking with Wolf, bringing the meeting to a close.
“I do not recall having another conversation with Keina after that,” Barnes told Redwood Voice. “If they’re looking for why this information didn’t get told to Keina, Ted told me I wasn’t allowed to talk to Keina. She was his employee and I was forbidden to talk to her. At the time me and him were not on speaking terms either.”
A few weeks later, according to Barnes, when he retired as treasurer in April 2024, Wolf told him that the county’s accounts were reconciled.
“What happened between then and now I have no idea,” he said.
On Wednesday, in response to Brookings resident Georgia Cockerham, who described the Jan. 9 meeting as a stage show, Wolf urged her and other members of the public to “sit in my chair and show me” if they think they can do better.
“I do take it personally when people try to publicly attack me,” she said. “I’m a public employee. I have a right to work in an environment that is not harassing.”
