Listen to a discussion in the April 15th, 2025 Budget Committee meeting, where City Leaders discuss how the City failed to reconcile bank statements to the ledger from 2021 to 2024.
The embedded audio is both shocking and sad. Shady Cove's City Leaders were aware of a yearslong failure to reconcile, and discussed the problem in April 2025, during budget meetings.
To chuckles from long-time participants, Mayor Jon Ball (who has since resigned) explains how he stopped signing checks until he was made aware of a $3.5M balance in the City's accounts. In response to a question from one of the new budget commission members, multiple City leaders admit that the City stopped reconciling its books starting in 2021 and did not resume reconciliation until sometime in 2024. Finally, budget committee members talked about possible missing funds and appeared to accept that the problem was due to negligence.
SCA would like to note that during the time period in question (2021 thru early 2024), the City Administrator was Mr. Thomas Corrigan. Administrator Parry (whom Mayor Ball accused of being "incompetent") was not hired by the City until mid-May 2024.
“So just so you guys know, I’ll go back to last year time “ “In fall of 23, I quit signing checks for a period of a week and said I won’t sign any more checks until I know what are balances are because we had no clue. And was opened up to -- was shown two different accounts our chase account and our LGIP account and they were like three and a half million dollars. I’m like where did this money come from? And its nowhere to be seen in any of our budgets or anything else. That started in fall 2023 and we’ve been fighting that fight ever since. It was good to see where there wasn’t only two hundred grand there but it was also just – the whole business standpoint when you lose money you’re worried about it and if money just shows up unexpectedly your worried about it”
“Don’t you have a system whereby all these checks get balanced every month when the statements come in and then it all gets updated to a financial report?”
“There was a two-year lapse in that”
“How did that happen?”
“It was at least two” “I’d say that it was about a four years “
“So, you quit keeping track of the books?”
“Yeah” “Yes, basically”
“Oh my gosh”
“In 2021, they stopped reconciling the checking account and did not pick it back up again until probably sometime in early 24”
”And there was significant turnover at that time as well”
“Don’t you have a CPA or someone who stays on top of this?”
“There was turmoil all the way around, that City Administrator fired the auditor uhm and it was… “ “It was a mutual agreement to separate”
“And, the city at that point wasn’t working with even.” [An auditor] “We started even before Michele came on, we started using RVCOG’s CPA because we had no interaction at all with the CPA on a monthly or daily basis”. “Before I took office in 23 we had no monthly interaction at all with CPAs, it was all just done internally and it wasn’t being done internally ”
“Does anyone know if any money was taken during this process or do we know? “
” It didn’t appear…”
“From our first two audits it doesn’t appear, that’s was one of the things we asked Isler to look for was the disappearance of funds”. “In the first two audits, it didn’t appear they could track any disappearance”.
“It was more negligence than malfeasance”
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Additional Context to this Transcript: In August of 2021, the City’s auditor (KDP) did indeed resign – and budget committee participants were apparently aware of the reasons, from their discussion. The former City Administrator (Mr. Corrigan) did not hire another auditor (Isler CPA) until July 2022, almost a year later. SCM is skeptical of City leader’s claims that auditors found no financial malfeasance in the FY20-21 and FY21-22 audits. We note that both audits were considered “disclaimed” due to missing records so it’s possible evidence simply wasn’t available. The audits were also completed years late. FY21 was completed in May 2024, FY22 was completed in February 2025.
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THE CITIZENS OF SHADY COVE HAVE SPOKEN!!! We were notified on June 10th that Jackson County completed the signature verification. As we already knew, there were enough signatures to proceed with the recall. Mayor Richardson will have till June 15th to decide to resign or make the decision to have the City hold an election. We await the City's response.
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