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Years of mismanagement of documents in the Fairfax City Hall has contributed to the town's current lack of an audit and budget.
Underneath the Town of Fairfax City Hall’s leaky roof are stuffed manila folders, piles of cardboard boxes, missing documents and a recently elected mayor trying to prove to the town that the local government works for them.
Mismanagement of records critical to municipal operations like expenses, revenues, contracts, invoices and other documents has been occurring for years in the Town of Fairfax. This lack of organization has resulted in multiple downstream issues, like the town’s lack of an audit and inability to form a budget.
“You can’t just blame the person before you, but you have to state the facts,” said Mayor Butch Sauls, who was elected in November 2023 on a platform of increased transparency between the local government and the town’s citizens. “It’s not looking good for the Town of Fairfax, and nobody has been held accountable for this mess.”
Missing documents, scattered funds
The Town of Fairfax’s municipal records are stored in piles of cardboard boxes in the back rooms of City Hall. These boxes are unlabeled and contain loose papers with little organization, according to Sauls. Being able to pull records, specifically financial records that would help the process of an audit and a budget, has been a challenge for his office.
“When I came in here … boxes were just stacked up, they didn’t even mark the date or what was in the boxes,” Sauls said. “Some of them were busted open, just thrown in there, never put in order where you could go find what you need to find.”
Since taking office, Sauls has made organizing records a top priority for the City Hall office. The most disorganized period of records, Sauls said, is between 2019 and the present, which was during former mayor Dorothy Riley’s tenure.
In response to a request for comment, Riley wrote via email, “I'm not the mayor anymore, please contact the current mayor.” Riley did not respond to a follow-up email with detailed questions regarding her handling of documents.
“The whole month of December I was there [at the office], trying to get it straight,” said Fairfax council member Phyllis Smart. Council members Ken Ready and Tiffine Forester, who served on council under Riley, did not respond to requests for comment.
The pattern of mismanagement is not limited to financial records; Money in the Town of Fairfax’s current bank accounts has also been misplaced.
On September 22, 2023, the Town of Fairfax received an $11,000 grant from the South Carolina Department of Public Safety for the Fairfax Police Department. This money was intended to be used for equipment repairs, body cameras and vests. However, in the five months since the town has received the grant, the money has not gone toward its intended purpose.
Instead, the money was put into the town's general fund, where it sits to this day; Typically, grant money and general fund revenues are segregated to separate municipal bank accounts to ensure the grantor that the money is being spent as intended.
As a result, the town is sending a letter to the South Carolina Department of Public Safety explaining what happened and that the town will be moving the grant money back into the public safety grant account.
Sauls and administrative workers are working overtime to organize the office. Keeping the town’s bills paid is a challenge, Sauls said, let alone getting out in front of the economic and social issues the town faces, like community gun violence and the local nutrition crisis.
Community center FOIA request
In August 2023, The People-Sentinel submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to then-Fairfax mayor Riley requesting all available information regarding the uncompleted community center, a project that was conceived in 2016. The town partially fulfilled the request, sending The People-Sentinel a collection of meeting minutes and contracts related to the community center that dated back to 2020. However, documents like invoices and banking records were not contained.
In December, after Sauls took office, The People-Sentinel resubmitted the request. Sauls told The People-Sentinel he will fulfill the request with as many records as he can find about the community center, including documents he believes could jeopardize the town’s image.
Under FOIA law, a municipality has a maximum of thirty-five calendar days to fulfill a request, depending on the age of the documents being requested. Since The People-Sentinel resubmitted the FOIA request, these thirty-five days have come and gone.
However, due to the state of mismanagement, Sauls has been unable to locate many of the documents requested by The People-Sentinel. Simply pulling files related to the request is a challenge, Sauls said, since so many documents are in so many different places and some documents related to the request are unable to be found.
Art Williams, a contractor who played the lead role in the community center and stepped away from the project after Sauls was sworn in, declined to comment.
No audit, no budget, no grants
Since 2022, the Town of Fairfax has been operating without a budget. At a January 6 meeting with the community, Sauls said the town is operating on a week-to-week basis. At the meeting, council member Phyllis Smart said the Town of Fairfax is in a state of emergency, although a formal emergency declaration has not been made.
“I'm trying real hard not to declare a state of emergency or declare bankruptcy or anything like that,” Sauls said. “It’s been frustrating for me.”
The last time the town had a budget was in 2022, and an audit has not been performed in two years. The town is currently in pursuit of both, however, neither can be created without an organized portfolio of the town's income, expenses, contracts, banking transactions and other financial documents.
These types of situations are partially a result of a lack of oversight of local governments, according to Kimberly Nelson, a professor of public administration at the University of North Carolina’s School of Government who specializes in local government management.
“There are cases out there where things are just so poorly managed that these things happen,” Nelson said. “The more problematic an audit is, the more it will cost. It takes much longer [to conduct an audit] when there’s problems when everything’s good and in top shape.”
The town is currently conducting a two-year audit, which Sauls said at a council meeting will cost $25,000. The town recently hired Brandon Upson, a political strategist from Columbia, to act as a grant writer.
While campaigning in November 2023’s municipal election, Sauls and other council members campaigned on getting the town a grocery store and rebuilding its aging infrastructure. Both Sauls and the new council have made attempts to move forward on these issues since their inauguration. However, addressing them requires grants, which local governments cannot apply for without showing that it can balance a budget and complete an audit.
A path forward
Although much remains to be organized, Sauls said the office is making progress. The town is in the process of transforming its digital presence with the software company QS1, adding an online payment option for water bills and creating both digital records and paper records.
However, the limited resources and staffing of City Hall, combined with navigating the town’s other issues, makes it hard to move quickly. Sauls and the council are considering hiring a part-time employee solely devoted to helping the town get organized.
Sauls has also considered ordering a forensic audit — a type of audit performed with the intent of finding evidence of fraud or embezzlement — crimes Sauls believes may have occurred. However, getting a forensic audit done, Sauls estimates, would cost $120,000.
“We have done 100 percent better from where we started: those girls [in the office] have worked hard,” said Smart. “They’re working hard to try and pull it together.”
Sauls said he plans to have more events with the town where citizens can raise concerns and ask questions in an informal environment. Rebuilding trust with the community, Sauls said, means living up to his promise of a local government that is transparent even in its darkest moments.
“What we’re going to have to do is go physically box by box,” Sauls said. “For the citizens, it’s frustrating to be hearing the same things over and over again. There has to be accountability for the way it is.”
Elijah de Castro is a Report for America corps member who writes about rural communities like Allendale and Barnwell counties for The People-Sentinel. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep Elijah writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today.
