$41,227 utility bill paid for empty Juvenile Court building

For almost nine years, the Hamilton County Juvenile Court unwittingly paid a total of $41,227 in monthly electric bills for a building it hasn’t used since 2001.

County Auditor Bill McGriff said the mistake has led to the verification of the physical locations of about 140 general county buildings to make sure that, in the future, local government pays utilities only for buildings that are occupied.

Utility bills also will be scrutinized routinely by building maintenance managers, said county Finance Administrator Louis Wright.

“Ultimately, our system failed us,” Mr. Wright said.

The county attorney’s office is seeking possible restitution from either the EPB or subsequent tenants of the building in question, which currently is abandoned, he said.

The Hamilton County auditor’s office found the mistake late last year, nearly nine years after the county terminated its lease for a building at 1400 S. Holtzclaw Ave. that had been used to run Juvenile Court’s child support division.

Juvenile Court Administrator Chris Albright who, along with Juvenile Court Clerk Ron Swafford oversees the two operating budgets for the court, said the county knew the court no longer occupied the building.

Yet records show that while one of two power meters on the building was shut off, another remained in the county’s name and continued to rack up charges.

“We trusted whoever takes care of the bills in accounting to transfer the service entirely,” Mr. Albright said.

Mr. Swafford, who is up for re-election in August, declined to comment, saying he never has dealt with utility bills.

His GOP opponent, Gary Behler, recently discovered evidence of the billing mistake in the court’s 2009 audit report and since has used it as an example of “fiscal irresponsibility” in the clerk’s office as he seeks Mr. Swafford’s job.

But Mr. McGriff was reluctant to assign blame for the snafu, stating the bills simply “fell through the cracks.”

“It’s just been a very freaky thing. Clearly someone dropped the ball,” Mr. McGriff said.

It probably wasn’t all the fault of Juvenile Court administrators, whose two operating budgets got hit equally by the bills, Mr. McGriff explained.

Unlike most bills that require the signatures of administrators in their respective departments to be paid, one consolidated bill from EPB goes directly to the county’s central accounting office, Mr. McGriff said. The accounting office, without requiring signatures, pays the various amounts on the bill, then deducts the amounts from the respective county budgets.

Juvenile Court, like all other county departments, never would have seen the actual utility bills, Mr. McGriff said. And because Juvenile Court came in under budget for the last 10 years, there were never any red flags signaling an overpayment, such as for electrical power.

Mr. Wright said the county accounting office pays utility bills directly because “it’s a recurring charge” and the county “never wants to risk getting power cut off to one of its buildings.”

Despite the billing mistake, Mr. Wright said there are no plans to change the current system other than to pay closer attention to the bills in the future.