The town of Itta Bena has fallen further behind on payments to Leflore County for police protection and garbage collection, as the municipality continues to fall further into debt.
The town is now about $30,000 behind on its garbage bill to the county and owes another $38,000 for law enforcement in the town, Leflore County Administrator Sam Abraham told the Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
“Our problem is we’re not getting anything for the last few months,” Abraham said.
Itta Bena’s Board of Aldermen is scheduled to meet this evening at 6 p.m. to discuss further cuts to its budget. Mayor Thelma Collins has said the budget “doesn’t match reality.”
The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to try to schedule a meeting with Itta Bena officials and try to reach an understanding about the timely payment of fees.
Under a pair of agreements hammered out at the end of July, the county agreed to take over garbage collection in the town for $10 per household per month. The town’s Board of Aldermen voted to close its police department, agreeing to pay $229,000 per year to contract with the Leflore County Sheriff’s Department to enforce the law in the town of about 2,000.
Although Itta Bena has continued to collect garbage fees for at least some of its residents — the town is currently charging $20 per household per month — that money has not been making it to the county, Abraham said. The Office of the State Auditor has warned that all the money paid in garbage fees had to go to the county.
“They’re in violation of state law right now,” Abraham said. “Somebody’s got to be receiving that money when they come in to pay, and we’re supposed to be getting that money — but we’re not.”
Itta Bena Mayor Thelma Collins said this morning that she wasn’t familiar with the specifics of any debts to Leflore County but that she had been under the impression that the town had been catching up.
“I do know that there were some things that I was not aware of. We’re in the process of finding, discovering some things,” Collins said, adding that she was working “around the clock” with a newly hired city clerk to sort out paperwork at city hall.
At the time the two governments struck the agreement in July — weeks after the IRS had slapped a federal tax lien on Itta Bena for $200,000 in unpaid payroll taxes — the deal was billed as a major cost-saving step for the town, allowing it to shed employees and sharply reduce expenses.
As the financial health of the municipality has continued to deteriorate, it has fallen behind on a number of bills, including to the county. That may put the county in a position of violating state law itself if it continues to let Itta Bena float along without delivering payment, District 2 Supervisor Robert Moore said.
Fees and interest on the federal tax debt have continued to mount, as have other unpaid bills. The city now owes about $750,000 to the Municipal Energy Association of Mississippi (MEAM), which provides the town’s electricity.
Payments on a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development Agency also went missing for several years, leading the federal agency to demand $130,000 by Oct. 7. Other debts reportedly include missing contributions to the state pension system and unpaid litigation fees to City Attorney Willie Perkins Sr.
Compounding the problem has been lax or missing bookkeeping at Itta Bena City Hall. In part because fees of $15,000 went unpaid to the Greenwood accounting firm of Taylor, Powell, Wilson & Hartford, which had previously conducted audits for the town, the city went without an outside audit for nearly five years.
Greenwood accountant Bob Knight recently completed an audit of the town’s 2011 books — after more than two years of work — but Itta Bena still has not had audits of more recent years.
Collins this morning described disorganization within the town’s offices. She said new City Clerk Edna Beverly has been working with her to sort out the city’s books, following the resignation earlier this year of former City Clerk LaCheronda Spivey and former Assistant Clerk Rena Baker.
Despite the bleak picture, Collins — a retired teacher who’s been an eternally optimistic cheerleader for the town — said she hasn’t lost her confidence that Itta Bena will turn things around.
“I’m a firm believer that, no matter what anybody says or how it looks, we’re on our way to getting things straightened out,” Collins said this morning. “It’s just going to take some time. I have not lost heart; I have not lost faith.”
At Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, Moore said a part of the challenge in assisting Itta Bena and collecting the county’s money would be determining where the town’s revenue has been going.
“My concern is: What happened to the money?” Moore said. “We can’t help if we can’t find out where the money goes.”
District 4 Supervisor Wayne Self, an Itta Bena resident, said he’d fought to help out the town but that the county simply couldn’t continue extending credit to the town.
Self said that Itta Bena’s financial woes have wound up hurting the town’s residents the worst. The debts have led the town to cut back on services while increasing fees and taxes in a bid to balance its books. “This is a burden on the citizens more than anything,” Self said.
• Contact Bryn Stole at 581-7235 or bstole@gwcommonwealth.com.
