Uncollected Revenue

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Ben Barrett, Jr., new Public Works Director stated that there's over $100,000 in old water bills that is still owed to the City of Lumberton. A few months ago, a collection attorney asked the board to hire her to collect the money owed to the city; for a stipend of course. Kent Crider has said time and time again that the city's loss of revenue is due to the lack of industry, but on the other side of his mouth, he along with Gibson, Hale and Johnson thought this industry-less city needed another deputy clerk, which led to the hiring of Cynthia Wall. Now this post is not about Wall, but it's about the lack of accountability regarding the finances of the City of Lumberton. Not only do we have a problem with past due bills in the water department, there is also over $500,000 in uncollected tickets and fines.
Instead of outsourcing the work to another person, where there are three clerks in Lumberton is ridiculous. The City of Lumberton is paying for an attorney, and the City of Lumberton is paying for three clerks. It's time for those positions to start paying for themselves. What's the point of having a police department write ticket after ticket if they're only going to target certain individuals for collection? The clerks can get the city attorney to draft a collection letter or they could just copy and paste his signature like they do when they need a warrant and send it out to those that are delinquent.
The collection attorney was going to use the library and Google to help find those that have moved and I'm sure we have enough clerks to do the search themselves. Also, once the collection attorney located the person, they would need to take them to court in some instances and the City of Lumberton would be responsible for paying the $65 filing fee for justice court and if and when they get a judgment, it's not guaranteed that the person would pay. So, cut out the middle man and assign Susan Guidry to work the cases of delinquent water bills and have Cynthia Wall go through the uncollected fines and tickets and any money collected would go directly to the City of Lumberton and there would be no need to split the collected funds with a third party. It may be more work for the deputy clerks, but at least they would be showing that they are bringing in revenue to offset the cost of having that many clerks in one office.

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 10, 2011 at 12:49 PM

    Actually the collected money from lawsuits would have the attorney fee added to it as well as the court costs. If the debtor paid due to the demand letter, no collection fees would have been charged by the attorney. Only if it went to court and only upon collecting. There would have been no splitting or taking away from the City for collecting the water bills. So beyond the postage which they would pay whether it is a clerk or whether it is an attorney sending it, there would be no additional expense to the city on the water bill portions.

    The very small fee asked for by the attorney addressed only collecting the large amount of overdue fines. Said fee was not going to come even close to real compensation for the time that would have been put into collecting those.

    ReplyDelete

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