Columbiana Port Authority Brings Books Up-to-Date
EAST LIVERPOOL, Ohio -- Since becoming fiscal officer of the Columbiana County Port Authority a year ago, Penny Traina has worked to make its financial statements easier to understand and have its books more accurately reflect what the authority owns and how it acquired its assets.
She has been cleaning up entries from old projects, such as the sale of the former Youngstown & Southern Railroad and the Baard land project so they reflect their real-life status, not just their accounting status.
One practice she initiated in an effort for greater transparency is providing both members of the board and the press the checkbook register that shows all port authority expenditures and deposits of the preceding month.
At the monthly meeting of the port authority Monday night, she invited David M. Stacey, a certified public accountant, to attend and confirm her cleaning up old entries so the balance sheet more accurately reflects what the port authority owns in fact and not just the accounting rules.
To that end, the former Y&S Railroad, finally sold last month, is no longer listed as an asset worth $2.04 million, and sale of the Baard land project, once proposed as the site to build coal gasification project and listed as an asset worth $39,361, was also removed.
Stacey is a partner in the East Liverpool public accounting firm of Miller, Stacy & Associates Inc., which has provide the board with a monthly independent accountant’s compilation report the last 20 years.
The CEO of the port authority, Tracy Drake, commended Traina for her efforts, still ongoing, to make the financial reports of the authority “cleaner, clearer and crisper, … less complex and easier to read.” In his 20 years as head of the economic development organization, there was little turnover in the membership of the five-member board, he noted. All members were aware of the status of all projects and their sources of financing.
In the last five years, the Columbiana County commissioners have revamped the membership of the board so that only Charlie Presley, the chairman, has served more than five years.
Traina continues to identify the sources of funding for each property the authority owns so one can easily see how much of each is funded by grants or authority operations, such as rents, and the cash flows of each asset.
Over the past two decades, Drake noted, some $37 million in grants have flowed through the port authority treasury to finance the industrial parks it owns and the improvements made there.
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Copyright 2014 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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