With new office scheduled to open, brighter days ahead for Wedowee Utilities Board
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The new office for the Wedowee Utilities Board will be open for business Monday, July 6.
After a tumultuous several months the Wedowee Utilities Board appears to be on the path to steadier ground. The board went through a transition of leadership in February that saw Wedowee mayor Tim Coe removed as chairman of the three-person board and former office administrator and bookeeper Brenda Boone fired.
In the midst of that it was discovered that the board was in deep financial peril, there were questions as to whether the money was being handled properly, and state law enforcement opened an investigation into the goings-on of the board.
But swift action by the town in the moment helped stave off disaster. The Wedowee Town Council installed Barry Waldrep as the new board chairman to replace Coe, and Waldrep in turn hired Randy Benefield as executive director to run the board’s day to day operations. The board also added Beth Brown as the Utitlies’ accountant to help clean up the financial situation.
Since then Benefield went to work providing missing information to the board’s outside accounting firm MDA Professional Group. It was MDA’s audit findings at the beginning of this year that opened the floodgates to the many changes that have taken place.
“If you remember, there was a lot of stuff [in the audit], and 98 percent of that stuff has already been addressed,” Benefield said Monday. “Security of the inventory, how we do cash management, all of those things have already been to the point that MDA said that they can’t believe we got all that accomplished in the four months that we’ve had.”
The board’s financial situation, which put the board “months away from bankruptcy” according to an evaluation in February, has also greatly stabilized.
At this point last year the board was operating with a year-to-date loss of over $200,000. Through the first five months of this year the new management has the organization operating over $100,000 in the black.
“It’s roughly a $300,000 upswing,” Waldrep said.
“We’re really quite taken back that there’s that positive of a change on not much more revenue being generated at all,” Benefield said. “We’re just now starting to see some of the financial changes that we’ve made coming into impact, so we’re quite taken back also that the money is where it’s at.”
In addition to putting out those fires, Benefield has has created a new user-friendly website and has a new office location ready to open on July 6. The board’s next meeting scheduled for July 8 will take place in the newly opened building on Main Street, where First State Bank once was.
Waldrep said the new facility will be an all-around upgrade for everyone involved.
“I think a lot of people are seeing now with Randy’s knowledge that they really see how things need to be. And they’re on board for that,” Waldrep said. “I think that it’s going to be a good place to work for them, it’s going to be good for the community, good for us.”
The board will be able to utilize the building’s drive-through window for more convenient transactions. The building also has more storage, and the safe that was used by the bank remains in the building as well.
The building itself will also add to the financial stability of the utilities board.
“Right now we operate without a line of credit. We’ve just got cash, and that’s it,” Benefield said. “This building will allow me to get a $400,000 to $500,000 line of credit on it, depending on what the appraisal comes back with the bank. So we’ll have an operating line of credit that we’ve never had before, that if something were to go wrong we could get that money. So really that’s one of the big factors of this building, is being able to financially just have a better financial strength.”
Waldrep also mentioned a state of the art security system as well as technology that will allow the board to livestream all of its meeting to its website and keep an archive of those meetings on the site.
“I do think that it’s important that people understand that there’s planning going on here because people have seen the same thing for years and years and years,” Benefield said. “And I don’t know if they ever got the correct answers on everything. And that’s what we’re trying to be transparent about.”
That extends to common issues encountered by Wedowee residents, such as brown water coming out of their taps.
Benefield said that the water goes into the city’s pipes clean, but the wear on the inside of those aging pipes can leave residue in the water as it travels to people’s homes.
“I get a picture of the water leaving the water plant almost every morning. Very clear, beautiful water,” Benefield said. “But if there’s interruptions in the system somewhere with breaks, or if we get somebody that opens a fire hydrant that wasn’t supposed to open one doing flushing, it agitates the system and some of the stuff that’s been in the system for a while will get loose, and it will show brown water.”
The long-term solution to that issue is expensive and time-consuming, so Benefield is asking for patience from the town’s residents.
“I want people to know we’re not just saying, oh, we’re going to always have brown water,” Benefield said. “We want to do something about that, but to do that we have to start planning. It’s not something that’s going to happen in 30 days. You’re talking 2-5 years away. But no one’s done anything about it for 30-40 years. At least now we’re focusing on what can be done about it to make it better.”
