COLUMBUS, Ga. (WRBL) — The Columbus City Council met Tuesday evening to discuss a number of topics. At the top of their list: an ongoing audit into the city’s finance department.
Money has been a hot topic in the city council chambers since August of 2023, leading the council to hire Troutman Pepper, an Atlanta law firm, that assisted with the internal audit. The motion to call for the hiring of Troutman Pepper was made by District 7 Councilor Joanne Cogle.
The focus of Troutman’s investigation was the backlog of business and alcoholic beverage license renewals.
During Tuesday night’s council meeting, Troutman attorney, Charles Peeler, addressed the elephant in the room: is $45.1 million of city money unaccounted for? Peeler says per their investigation, “there is no evidence to support the claim that there is $45.1 million of revenue missing.”
Peeler also addressed a number of recommendations for the city including, increase attention to employee retention and training and increase the monitoring and enforcement of late and delinquent licenses.
Here is Mayor Skip Henderson’s reaction to these recommendations.
I think the main thing to understand is that these folks work hard. We did have, and they didn’t lean on that as an excuse, but we did have some extenuating circumstances. You had COVID come through. It created a great walkout. People leaving their jobs and it was very difficult to try to identify folks to take the jobs. Then the mayor, council and the city government as a whole in trying to help our citizens, we pushed back some of the due dates. Well, I don’t think we realized that while we were pushing it back, we were compressing the amount of time for them to do their work.
Skip Henderson, Mayor of Columbus
Troutman’s findings show there is a backlog of business and alcoholic beverage licenses dating back to 2016.
Here is a full list of the recommendation:
