Olmsted Falls hires $200-an-hour consultant to clean up city’s bookkeeping issues - cleveland.com

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OLMSTED FALLS, Ohio -- Late last year, former Olmsted Township finance director Nick Vitalone brought up the topic of the city’s messy debt service funds, which for more than a decade have caused one headache after another related to empty balances and unneeded accounts.

City Council earlier this month approved the hiring of the Gateway Group’s Rick Merolla to review city finance procedures related to debt reconciliation.

“This issue has been going on for over 10 years, if not longer,” Mayor James Graven said. “It’s important to have an objective expert with over 30 years of experience review the debt service funds.

“I believe that Rick offers an approach to this issue that allows us to solve the problem in a timely manner and move forward.”

The city is paying Gateway Group $200 an hour, not to exceed $5,000 in total, to complete the project.

“The consultant we hired has many years of experience with city finances, including bond fund accounting,” City Council President Paul Stibich said.

“It will be good to have an experienced set of eyes review our bond funds to explain the balances.”

Earlier this year, Olmsted Falls named Cory Swaisgood as its new part-time finance director. Initially, he was going to look at the city’s books to see if he could solely clean up the debt service fund mess.

“It came down to timing and resources,” Swaisgood said. “With me being new and having other priorities, we came to the conclusion that it would be best to contract this work out to get it done in a more timely manner.”

Those priorities involved not only getting up to speed with Olmsted Falls finances, but also working on the 2021 budget.

So far, Swaisgood has been working closely with Merolla, who is digging through paperwork dating back 15 years.

“He’ll have a report for us on his recommendation to move forward in the next month,” Swaisgood said. “I’d say by the end of the year he’ll get everything cleaned up, with any legislation needed going in front of council.

“So we’ll have this cleaned up for the 2022 budget and going forward.”

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