Travis County Commssioners Court
July 8, 2003
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Item 18
Now, I think 18 and 19 go together. 18 is to consider and take appropriate action regarding a source of funding from the contract with Texas closed captioning reporters for closed and open captioning services. Let me -- let's see if we can shorten this. When we've done this contract before, it was brought to us that the recommendation was to take $15,000 from the risk management fund. Since that time -- the money was never transferred, and serious questions have been raised about whether or not this is a legitimate risk management fund expenditure anyway, and the past language makes reference to insurable risks and other language. So when I talked with christian, it seems a simple matter for to us take $15,000 from allocated reserve of the general fund. And not even worry about the risk management. 15,000.
>> came up with a solution that's probably more [inaudible]. It's really not 15,000.
>> for item 23?
>> and we gave you some backup, but really the recommendation is in 5 on here. That is it appears the risk management fund will not need as much money as we are plan to go transfer out of the general fund, so the suggestion that our office would make and I believe that risk management and h.h.s. Concur with the recommendation is we transfer the 28,000 that's going to be needed for the entire rests of the contract from the fund in the general fund that would have transferred into the risk management fund. So we won't take it out of the risk management fund, we won't need to go into allocated reserve, but the money will be there for the contract.
>> but the money -- repeat that last statement.
>> the money will be there for the contract. So instead of transferring premium money into the risk management fund which we believe will not be needed, 28,000, we'll take it from that premium line item and put that into h.h.s., The line item for this. So we accomplish the same thing. It's fully funded, but it's not coming out of the risk management fund.
>> how will that affect -- i'll wait until we get to 19. I was wondering how --
>> I guess if you provide the funding, I think 19 just adds the realtime translation service.
>> it's a modification. That's at no cost.
>> right, no cost.
>> the funding, that's -- but we are convinced now that we're looking at the shortfall of 28,000. Not 23.
>> right.
>> and the general fund premium line item, what's that?
>> what that is is the risk management fund is an internal service funding and the money is transferred into that fund from the various funds including the general fund. And so that is budgeted already. And the way it looks at this point from looking at the actuary's recommendation for year end and the data that we have between our office and risk management, it looks like that if we didn't transfer -- if we did not transfer 28,000, the fund would still be fine. And so this would allow us to really not go to risk management fund, not go to allocated reserves and use $28,000 from that premium line item which we do not believe you will need in the risk management fund.
>> okay. So if we transfer it from the premium line item when it's needed.
>> to h.h.s., Yes.
>> or do we make the transfer now?
>> it needs to be transferred now because they need to encumber those funds.
>> okay. And in terms of budget -- okay. That's not on today. What's on today's agenda is the recommended transfer from allocated reserve. The recommendation is take it from the general fund premium line item instead. Can we do that today?
>> sure. I think what we can do is just substitute this premium liability account, which is 001-(114)522-4405 for the entire $28,000 to 0015861611601 a., And that would replace ds 1 on the budget amendments and transfers. And we could amend those transfers accordingly.
>> can we do that in writing and get it to the clerk sometime today?
>> sure.
>> any objection to the proposed solution to this problem? Taking $28,000 from the general fund premium line item?
>> no.
>> from any of the parties that have been working on this? Move approval.
>> judge, can I ask a kweu.
>> and I have a comment.
>> I’m not as concerned with the dollars as what is confusing to me is there seems to be a procedural issue here that is bigger-i mean obviously I’m always amazed that we got more funds and more accounts with dollars you can move from here to there. Maybe in about a year i'll figure that out. But the procedural part of this thing is the confusing thing to me. I mean, when somebody -- can somebody in a nutshell even lighten me as to what has happened and why we have this issue?
>> well, one of the things -- and this is a response to diane's memo to the court. Procedurally what happened is the department enters a requisition into the system to pre-encumber the funds for that contract t auditor insists these funds be pre-encumbered and are verified as available prior to to a contract being awarded. So the department entered a requisition for the $55,000. The auditor verified the funds were there. Then it comes to my office and it's still a requisition because they won't release the requisition until the contract is approved by court for us to issue the purchase order. So after we review and verify that funds are requisitioned, pre-encumbered, we prepare agenda item. And -- at the time we did that, the department went back and pulled out those funds because apparently this whole funding issue came about. We were not made aware and the auditor was not made aware, and I’m not sure that this issue would have even come to light if we hadn't had had the risk management issue thrown in here and us doing the modification. So for me, and I think susan, there's a control issue. Is it a system control? Should the system funds somehow red flag my office a requisition has been pulled after we've gone forward and asked the cord to approve a contract? I guess procedurally we need to do a better job of communicating to the financial folks in the department, they should not go back and pull the requisition that has been approved by Commissioners court without telling my office and the auditor's office. At least my office. And we can come forward and wobg with the department to correct the situation. So susan, from a control standpoint, do you have the same opinion?
>> right. You all assume when you get contract to sign, the reason it seems confusing, Commissioner Daugherty, is because it's such a decentralized organization. But you all have the right to assume when a contract comes to court, that everyone who is supposed to look at it did and signed off out. So you make that assumption. And what happened here is after everyone did sign off on it, the department pulled the money out. The reason that's important is that there are no valid contracts unless the auditor certificates that available funding is there. And so it's very important not to do that. And it was probably just an error on the department's part. And I think that we can straighten that out. So I would just call that a miscommunication and an error. But the reality is for anyone listening from another department, once the funds are certified, the law says you cannot uneven couple pwer funds until the purpose for which those funds were encumbered have been taken care of and in this case it had not. But I think there was some confusion. I think the department understands that. And we also are looking to make sure that we've got some control where it doesn't happen again.
>> and we're, the departments are in total agreement with that. Originally we had completed a requisition for the full amount of the contract, and then right before it came to court, then we were told that risk management would be contributing funds to this. So we had to cancel that requisition because we need to do lower -- we can't have two requisitions for the same amount or whatever, but we had to lower our requisition amount, so we never -- then the funding controversy came up and the risk management funding, so we've never entered the req again. Then we thought risk management was going to do a req amount. That's what happened. We're in total agreement with what the auditor and purchasing aet are saying.
>> I guess I asked the question earlier or I had mentioned 18 and 19, I meant to say 27, how will it affect that. It will have slight impact as far as you getting it back in writing dealing with the [inaudible] but that was basically the gist of how it will impact item 27.
>> we have checked the balances. Sometimes it just takes a couple of to get down the line before it gets balanced or checked.
>> well, if a contract comes before us for approval, then I routinely check the source of funding. Because the county attorney has told me repeatedly the money is supposed to be there to back up the contract before approval. So I checked that. For some reason I always thought if you need a certain amount of money, it comes from three sources, immediately after approval the money would be transferred into a line item to fund the contract.
>> well, when they entered the requisition, this is by line item. So the money was pre-encouple pwerd are the contract funds would be taken out of. That's how it's supposed to work. What tripped them on this one is them pulling that requisition out after you had approved the contract and not telling my office or --
>> but it was pre-encumbering on paper and then there is pre-encumbering. My thinking was that the money would be in the line item.
>> and that's what the --
>> that's what it's supposed to be.
>> and that's the way you don't exceed your budget. That is you don't make a legal agreement when money has not been appropriated by the Commissioners court, county law, and that's why the law says unless the money is there, it's not a valid contract. So it is an important step. That the money is there in the right line item. Because you approve a line item budget. It's not somewhere in the county we think we'll have this. It's back what you said, judge, whatever line item you encumber that contract, the money has to be there. So when people deal with the county, they also are assured there is money for the services we have contracted.
>> I might add one thing, judge, and the Commissioners, that the money was always for our portion of the contract for the hhs portion was always in the correct line item at the time that the contract was approved by the court members.
>> but I mean if we were going to transfer 15,000 from risk management fund, the question is, if that were going to happen, when should it have happened?
>> it should have happened -- the money should have been in the right place before the requisition was made. So it ought to be -- so that would have been looked at at the time. 15 should have been in the risk management fund and the rest in the general fund. So it should have been there and, you know, encumbered there right up front.
>> so the risk management could have ahead of time -- I’m confused about that. I mean, is that really what you use risk management for? That, you don't have a kris kal ball. That really is for whenever we go --
>> our thinking is that you do not and we still need to look at that more. The suggested solution today kind of bypasses that issue. It solves it in another way, but that issue still needs to be dealt with because, again, you've got laws that set these funds up and that's what they are used for. So we need to do some more discussing on that one. But this fixes it today.
>> a policy issue we need to address at some point in the future.
>> yes, sir.
>> yes.
>> if we can solve this problem, delay consideration of that issue another week or two, maybe a couple of weeks, I think we ought to take a look at it.
>> maybe longer than that because it truly is a policy issue whether you just use it for liability or prevention measures. This is the only reason we thought it would be appropriate to use it in this because it was preventive of injuries we had seen.
>> yeah, we just need to discuss it and bring back policy.
>> this is one of those services that we believe is legally required. So, I mean -- we have persons actually physically sign ing this message. We went to that two or three years ago. And this seems to be better. Does it cost the same or less?
>> the cost is about the same.
>> any more discussion of 18? That is to take 28,000 from the general fund premium line item. All in favor? That passes by unanimous vote
Last Modified: Wednesday, July 9, 2003 5:52 AM