{"id":29866,"date":"2024-01-06T19:15:05","date_gmt":"2024-01-07T02:15:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/league-of-women-voters-to-host-cortez-city-manager-for-event-jan-13\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T01:05:51","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T07:05:51","slug":"league-of-women-voters-to-host-cortez-city-manager-for-event-jan-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/league-of-women-voters-to-host-cortez-city-manager-for-event-jan-13\/","title":{"rendered":"League of Women Voters to host Cortez city manager for event Jan. 13"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The
The city of Cortez on Monday closed the Cortez Public Library and Recreation Center to help protect staff and residents from exposure to the coronavirus.<\/span>The Journal file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

On Saturday, Jan. 13 at 10:15 a.m. at the Cortez Public Library, the Montezuma County League of Women Voters will be hearing from Cortez City Manager Drew Sanders regarding how budgets are prepared by local governments and safeguards used in the city to detect misuse of funds by employees.<\/p>\n

According to information provided to The Journal <\/em>by League of Women Voters\u2019 Judy Schuenemeyer, the attendees will also hear an update on the city\u2019s finances and forensic audits that were completed following the embezzlement of city funds in 2016.<\/p>\n

All in the community who are interested are welcome and invited to attend.<\/p>\n

\u201cDrew is going to talk about how local budgets get prepared, particularly as it relates to the city of Cortez, how they figure in the income and how they estimate costs,\u201d Schuenemeyer said. \u201cObviously, people are interested in the financial healthy of the City after an employee embezzled a significant amount of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are interested in getting an update on that,\u201d she added. \u201cI think a lot of people are interested in what kind of safeguards the city has and what any government entity should have to make sure this can\u2019t happen again. As taxpayers, we all want to know that our money is being spent wisely and that there aren\u2019t opportunities for people to embezzle money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the mission of the League of Women Voters is to help voters be informed on issues going on in their government at any level, and Schuenemeyer said events like this help do just that.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe certainly hope people will come,\u201d Schuenemeyer said.<\/p>\n

In a call with The Journal<\/em>, Sanders said the event will also be a celebration of audits finally being caught up as of December after the 2016 embezzlement.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to rebuild the financial system, and we had to go back and we went above and beyond to make sure the trial balance is tied together from year to year,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cThat is super-important because now we can look the community in the eye and say, \u2018We have accounted for your money.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a very long, arduous journey,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

One of the new implementations that Sanders said he will be speaking on at the event is a \u201cstrict system of internal controls.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery system has these, and they need to not only be put in place, but they need to be audited,\u201d he said. \u201cThey need to be paid attention to and strictly adhere to. There\u2019s a separation of duty. There\u2019s more than one set of hands that touches our money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sanders added that he will be seeking an external source to audit the new internal control system and provide a report so the community can know for sure that the city has done what they are saying.<\/p>\n

Now that the audits are up to date, Sanders said they can now \u201crelease impounded funds from our property tax from the state lottery and other sources.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city is also enrolled with a program called Clear Gov <\/a>that allows citizens to log on and view their city\u2019s budget, see where their tax dollars go and more.<\/p>\n

Sanders said that ultimately, he hopes that attendees will go away from the event with confidence in the City\u2019s financial system.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m hoping they come away with confidence in our system and competence in their counsel, confidence in management, that we are handling their money properly and we are good stewards of the city government and the resources we have available to us,\u201d he said. \u201cWe are doing everything we can to not only take care of it but show you that we\u2019re taking care of it and make sure the City can operate properly well into the future. We are now officially out of debt. We owe not one penny to anybody debt wise.\u201d<\/p>\n

In March, the League of Women Voters will do an event with county commissioners \u201cto talk about their initiative to have a sales tax on the ballot in November.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sanders will speak to attendees about the city\u2019s financial situation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,21,28,60,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-29866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-community","tag-cortez","tag-headlines","tag-montezuma-county","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":80894,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29866\/revisions\/80894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29866"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=29866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}