State Attorney Bill Eddins said Tuesday he intends to convene a grand jury to investigate “areas of concern” within the Walton County Planning Department.
His announcement came the same day county residents lined up to urge their elected leaders to have the state’s Auditor General investigate the 2005 failure of county planners to collect over $600,000 in recreation fees.
The State Attorney’s Office investigation of Walton County got underway several months ago when a packet of information, including an email detailing a $600,000 collection error, “as well as other information,” arrived at his office, Eddins said.
Since then, County Attorney Mark Davis has been called upon to provide hundreds of documents to Eddins’ office.
“We have areas of concern as far back as 2000,” Eddins said.
Those areas of concern, he said, “are so significant that I intend, at the end of this investigation, to present this case to a grand jury for their review and consideration.”
The email that helped get the investigation started, the same one that has more recently riled Walton County’s active citizenry, was allegedly sent May 21, 2008, from planner Melissa Ward to Pat Blackshear, who was then the director of Walton County planning.
In that email, Ward confesses to leaving out some zeros in calculating a 5 percent recreation fee for the Lakeside of Blue Mountain Beach subdivision. She sent the letter out May 26, 2005, she said.
Her mistake left a property with an assessed value of $12,285,000 with the bill for a property assessed at $12,285, Ward said.
The person or persons paying the recreation fee would therefore have been billed $614.25, rather than the correct $614,250.
“I accept the responsibility for the error,” Ward’s email said.
Blackshear, who was among those Tuesday calling for the Auditor General to investigate the $600,000 mistake, contends the Ward memo “looks a bit fixed.”
In an email of her own, sent June 12, 2015, Blackshear told Davis, the county attorney, “I have never seen such memo, ever, until just now. ... Someone or several are lying.”
Tuesday, Blackshear notified county commissioners that she is cooperating with the State Attorney’s Office, and added the Attorney General’s Office should be involved in looking at county government too.
“It grieves me that this was just discovered,” she said. “In the end, which developers were involved and who benefited.”
Residents Suzanne Harris and Bob Hudson told the commissioners they want to know if the uncollected $600,000 is an isolated case or if local developers benefitted from other Planning Department oversights.
Eddins wouldn’t expand on the areas of concern his investigators have uncovered, and also didn’t address specifics of who the inquiry might be focused upon.
Eddins did say his office is not presently looking at the unpaid $600,000 as a criminal act.
“At this point in time we are not aware of $600,000 in missing money,” he said. “The position of the county is that someone made a mistake. There’s no indication there is any money missing. There is an indication the wrong amount was charged.”
Harris and Hudson, though, said they believe the county has stonewalled their efforts to get information about the Planning Department and the collection of recreation fees and other county fees.
In an email sent in March from Davis to Harris, he estimated the cost to pull records together at $3,540.
County Commissioner Cindy Meadows helped lead the charge to get the Auditor General involved in investigating the case. She said she feared that “if we don’t get our house in order” the entities doling out RESTORE Act funds might shun Walton County.
Commissioners declined to take action on the citizen proposal to call in the Auditor General, though Board Chairman Bill Imfeld said he’s interested in insuring that the county is financially sound.
He said he’s notified the county’s auditing firm, Carr, Riggs and Ingram, of the Ward error.
“Carr, Riggs and Ingram has never identified any issue with cash flow or how things were done,” Imfeld said. “So I’m sure at least in the upcoming audit cycle they will be much more attuned.”
Imfeld said an Auditor General investigator “would take a different perspective” on county finances and he thought that would be beneficial.
“I’d like to see everything fully accounted for,” he said.
Imfeld was Walton County’s financial director at the time the $600,000 mistake was made. Current County Administrator Larry Jones and sitting commissioners Sara Comander and Cecilia Jones were serving on the governing board at the time.
