CASPER, Wyo. — On Monday, residents and volunteer firefighters urged the Board of Directors of the Casper Mountain Fire Protection District to take some steps to restore public confidence after questions came to light about taxpayer money that may have been misused under a former board treasurer.
“I got into this thing because I’m a donor, I’m a taxpayer and I’m a landlord here,” Sonny Rone, a resident who attended Monday’s meeting, told the board.
Rone said he had donated money to the Casper Mountain Wildland Firefighters Fund in 2021, a fundraiser set up by some volunteer firefighters to purchase wildland protection gear to help protect firefighters and recruit more volunteers so they wouldn’t need to buy the expensive gear themselves.
“I did it for a reason,” Rone said of his donation. “I wanted these young men and ladies to be safe and they needed the equipment. I was very happy with the way the money was treated and where it went and how it’s being spent … They’re working on it and I believe they are doing a great job.”
As it was said during the meeting firefighters have faced some criticism over the board’s problems, it is worth noting that the board of directors and the operational side of the Casper Mountain Fire Protection District are separate. The board of directors has fiduciary duties to oversee the financing and set a budget for the district. The fire chief, who is not a member of the board of directors, oversees operations.
Rone told the board he was upset the board hasn’t been able to get an audit done, something Natrona County offered to pay for as a prerequisite to helping purchase more wildland protective gear for the volunteer district. When Oil City News spoke with County Attorney Eric Nelson on June 27, he said the county was not asking for a full forensic audit. Rather, it was asking the board to agree to a limited accounting check, something the county would ask for anytime it considers helping make a purchase for another entity. The county had also offered to pay for the audit if the board could bring it a quote from an accounting firm.
“I don’t know who dropped the ball of getting the audit done,” Rone said during Monday night’s meeting. “It was supposed to have been done in December. It’s ran all the way till now; the county is not going to wait on that.”
Having a professional look at the books books is something Rone said he thinks the board should be doing on an annual basis.
“I do an audit on my businesses every year,” he told the board. “It’s easy. It’s cheap. You have an accountant. They go through the books. Guys, you are not accountants. You’re not book keepers. You’re on a board. You’re doing it for free … You need a professional, just like you need a firefighter who’s a professional. You’ve got to have that guy who is an accountant to get it done.”
It may not be quite as simple as Rone suggested for the board to get an audit complete. Accounting firms are inundated with requests from a variety of entities for auditing and accounting services in part due to the large amount of federal grant money flowing around in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mike Hansen, administrator with the Wyoming Department of Audit’s Public Funds Division told Oil City on Wednesday. That doesn’t mean an audit can’t get done but that it is plausible an entity could be running into difficulties securing such services quickly.
The remaining Casper Mountain Fire board members as well as Andrew Schneider, who recently resigned from the board in part as a way to bring attention to the missing taxpayer money questions and to call for new leadership on the board, have all said they’d like to have an audit get done to help give the board a fresh start. When residents called for the board to act on getting an audit done Monday, Board President Pat Harshman said she has been reaching out to accounting firms but has been having no luck.
“Currently, it’s pretty hard to find an accountant because of everybody’s excuse: ‘We’re short-handed. We don’t have the personnel. We have to handle our current customers,’” Harshman said. “Some firms said absolutely no, we will not take you on.”
Harshman was able to find one firm who indicated a willingness to help but that firm said it wouldn’t be able to help until after tax season was over. After tax season ended, Harshman got back in touch but was eventually told that firm too would be unable to help.
To complicate matters, board members confirmed they received communication from the county attorney on Friday that the county’s offer to help purchase the wildland protection gear and pay for the audit was being rescinded.
Tracy Lamont, a district resident and former volunteer firefighter, told the board another option it might have to try and get help with an audit would be reaching out to the Wyoming Department of Audit.
There is some help the Wyoming Department of Audit’s Public Funds Division can provide if boards reach out, Hansen said Wednesday. The Public Funds Division does not, however, conduct audits for boards that request such services in order to maintain its independence from the matter. One type of help the division can offer is to provide lists and contact information of private accounting firms that may be able to offer auditing services if a board is struggling to find one, Hansen said.
Another type of assistance the division offers is some help understanding Wyoming statutes as those relate to rules for properly accounting of how public funds are used. The division’s webpage on the Wyoming Department of Audit website includes links to relevant handbooks, statutes and also to training offered by the Wyoming Association of Special Districts.
The Wyoming Legislature passed a bill, signed into law by the governor this spring, that will require fiscal procedures training for public officers and members of boards overseeing the handling of accounts. Public officers who hold office as of July 1, 2023 will be required to complete the training by July 1, 2024. Hansen noted that the Wyoming Department of Audit has been tasked with developing the specific training the new law requires.
There are situations when the Public Funds Division will conduct an audit of an entity’s finances: when law enforcement asks the division to get involved in an investigation, Hansen noted.
The Casper Mountain Fire Board asked local law enforcement to get involved this spring due to some evidence indicating former Board Treasurer Richard Brehm may have used money controlled by the board to pay personal utility bills. Casper Police Department Detective Shannon Daley received documents from Schneider on March 16 that she put into evidence in her investigation, a report Oil City requested from the police department shows. That same day Daley conducted an interview with Schneider, who the board had authorized to approach law enforcement for help.
Two of the remaining board members brought the possible embezzlement concerns to the attention of the full board, Daley’s report based on her interview with Schneider said. Those two members are Margo Spurrier and Dave Mowry.
On April 5, Daley applied for and was granted a search warrant to obtain financial records from WyoCentral Federal Credit Union as the Casper Mountain Fire Board previously had an account with the credit union, the detective wrote in a report. Based on her interview with Schneider, Daley learned the board had decided to close that account after deeming it to be illegal for a special district to have that account.
While Daley submitted the warrant to WyoCentral to obtain the financial records on April 5, Brehm was found deceased on April 12 and after learning of this on April 19, Daley decided to close the investigation as he was the only suspect, her reporting shows.
“I’m sorry that my good friend Dick isn’t here to defend himself,” Lamont told the board during the meeting Wednesday. “I think none of this stuff was done intentionally. I think it was done just basically, ‘Oh, well, no one’s watching this, let’s do it.”
“You guys have all inherited this,” Lamont said. “And I mean all of you, okay? And I commend you all for stepping up and doing the job and making the changes that you made but I think there there is a lot more changes that need to be made on standard protocol here.”
Since the questions about the missing money came to light, the board has adopted a number of changes to try and ensure its practices align with Wyoming statutes governing public meetings and special districts. Some of those include the following, Spurrier said in an email to Oil City:
- regular monthly meetings announced in advance
- written treasurer’s reports
- approval of bills and receipt of funds
- mailbox keys in possession of more than one board member who is not the treasurer
- filing a copy of the minutes with the County Clerk’s office
While the board has made changes to how it conducts meetings and maintains records, Monday’s meeting made it apparent there are still some disagreements about things between board members. Mowry thought the document for the board’s proposed new fiscal year budget that was provided to people in attendance was not the correct one the board needed to submit to the state.
Harshman then read from a copy of another budget document. However, as copies of that document were not made available for other board members or the public to review and as Treasurer Karen Santistevan was not in attendance, Mowry motioned that the board table its budget hearing.
Unlike larger entites, the Casper Mountain Fire Board does not have the luxury of having an attorney on hand to give it advice about rules for conducting board business in accordance with state law. Harshman asked a firefighter in attendance who is not on the board but happens to have some knowledge of Robert’s Rules of Order whether Mowry’s motion needed a second. The firefighter advised that a motion does require a second and that eventually happened. The board voted to table the consideration of the budget as Mowry had motioned.
While all of the board members may have read through state statutes pertaining to special districts and public meeting rules, there are some differences in how they interpret those statutes. In other ways, the board members agree on a variety of things.
A number of the residents in attendance at Monday’s meeting agreed that the board should try and reach out to the county again to ask whether it might still be willing to help pay for an audit. The board adopted a motion to ask Mowry to communicate with the county to see if that might be possible.
If the county is at all willing to consider helping, Rone said it is possible the commissioners might have more stipulations than they did previously and that stipulations might involve asking some of the current board members to step down.
“Would you as a board be willing to retire and put a new board on if that’s one of the county commissioners’ stipulations?” he asked.
Harshman and Spurrier, who served on the board during some of Brehm’s time as treasurer, indicated they would be willing to retire from the board if that was one of the stipulations of getting the county to agree to support an audit. Rone, who said during the meeting he has a good relationship with some of the county commissioners, said he was not planning to encourage them to make it a stipulation that any current board member retire.
“I feel there’s too much he-said-she-said,” Rone added. “I think the board does everything they can here and I think you guys just need to get lined out as a business instead of everybody wanting to fight with everybody. Once you get an audit, once you get a bookkeeper helping you with accounting, you’re going to be so much happier, and I honestly believe that.”
Earlier in the meeting, Spurrier’s son, who has also served as a volunteer firefighter with the Casper Mountain Fire Protection District, defended his mom and Harshman. Both started serving as volunteer firefighters long before they joined the board of directors.
“I was on this fire department because of my mom,” Justin Spurrier said. “I have chosen a wildland firefighting career because of my mom. I remember being on a friend’s roof when the Elkhorn Canyon Fire was burning, watching that mountain, not sure if my mom was going to come home.”
“Pat Harshman. She’s been with this fire department as long as I can remember. My mom’s been doing this for 30 years. These two ladies, they care about this fire department. They want to see it succeed.”
Jeb Filkins, a volunteer who was in attendance at the meeting, said after Justin Spurrier spoke that he didn’t think anyone was questioning the service his mom and Harshman have given to the mountain as firefighters.
“I think everybody here loves that part,” he said. “And I think we all know that that’s not to be disputed.”
NOTE: There were a number of other things that came up during the meeting on Monday not discussed in this article. There was discussion of how far back an audit of the board’s finances should go. There was talk about whether merging the Casper Mountain Fire Protection District with the Natorna County Fire District would help improve its ISO rating. There was talk about the board’s budget for the new fiscal year. After the meeting, some of the firefighters who set up the Casper Mountain Wildland Firefighters Fund talked about their efforts and the need to recruit more volunteers.