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Hearing addresses reasons Mecca Township fiscal officer’s 'messed up' records
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
Atty. Mike Rossi made it clear, pretty quickly, that it wasn’t necessary for the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to establish that the Mecca Township financial records were in terrible shape when a representative with a private auditing firm tried to audit them in March.
Rossi told Judge Andrew Logan of Trumbull County Common Pleas Court Thursday he would agree it was true – to save time.
Judge Logan insisted on hearing some such testimony in a hearing on whether Mecca Township fiscal officer Deborah Drawl should be removed from office because of her poor financial record keeping. Judge Logan will decide whether to remove Drawl, without a jury.
Rossi called out several more times during the day-long hearing that the poor condition of the records was indisputable.
But when the attorney general’s office had called all of its witnesses, Rossi called Drawl to testify, asking her to talk about the reasons she was unable to keep the records properly.
Drawl was elected in November 2015 and took office April 1, 2016. She said she asked the township trustees in December 2015 and January and February 2016 for a letter certifying that she was about to become the fiscal officer so she could travel to Columbus to take free courses to prepare her for the job.
She said she never received the letter. “I wanted to know how to do this job correctly,“ Drawl said.
She eventually got training in January and February of this year when she attended a township association convention, but it wasn’t enough, she testified.
When Bethany Nelson of the independent auditing firm Perry and Associates approached Drawl in March to conduct the 2016 audit, Drawl said she told Nelson “the records were very much messed up,” Drawl testified. Drawl said she didn’t know how to fix them and needed more training.
Nelson testified that the records could not be audited because they were not labeled and were “just thrown in a box.”
The Ohio Auditor’s office declared Mecca Township’s records inauditable May 25 and gave Drawl 90 days to fix the problem. The state asked Drawl to resign in October when it was clear she hadn’t fixed them.
In his opening statements to Judge Logan, Steven Voigt of the attorney general’s office said the only pertinent facts are that Drawl knowingly refused to take proper care of the financial records, but Rossi disagreed.
“Nothing will show she refused to do anything,” Rossi said, arguing that Drawl wanted to get the necessary training, but the trustees refused to pay for it.
Drawl testified that she spoke with Tim Litner of the Ohio Auditor’s Local Government Services Office last summer about getting the training at a cost of up to $8,500, but the trustees refused, she said.
Voigt cross-examined Drawl, asking her why she didn’t take courses offered as free YouTube videos on the internet. Drawl said it was because she can’t learn that way. She needs to be able to ask the instructor questions, she said.