(Sept. 22 , 2011) Responsibility for the alleged procurement violations at Nantucket Memorial Airport has understandably fallen on the airport’s appointed commission and management staff.
Commission chairman Foley Vaughan resigned last week, and another commission member, David Gray, has called for airport manager Al Peterson to be placed on administrative leave pending the resolution of the state attorney general’s investigation.
But who else should be held responsible for the alleged infractions that prompted the investigation and a visit from the attorney general’s business and labor bureau last week?
Despite the airport’s relative degree of autonomy as an enterprise fund, town manager Libby Gibson admitted last Wednesday night that the Finance Department, under her administration, is not without blame.
“The town does bear some responsibility for some of these bills that should not have been paid,” Gibson told the Selectmen last week.
It is the Finance Department, after all, that receives invoices from all the town’s departments and enterprise funds, including the airport, and reviews the bills before forwarding them to the Board of Selectmen for approval in the weekly warrant.
“The tradition has been that for departments outside of town administration, it’s been assumed that they follow the procurement properly,” Gibson said in an interview on Tuesday. “That was an inappropriate assumption.”
While airport commissions in Massachusetts have some autonomy over their operations and the hiring of airport managers, the state Department of Revenue has affirmed that enterprise-fund operations such as Nantucket Memorial Airport are still subject to the same financial oversight standards as any town department.
“For the ordinary city or town department, the accountant is responsible for reviewing forwarded bills,” said Robert Bliss, a spokesperson for the state Department of Revenue. “The accountant can disallow if they are fraudulent, unlawful, which could be for procurement violations or other issues, or if they’re in excess of the available appropriation.
“An enterprise fund simply segregates the financial transactions of the enterprise from the general fund,” he added. “It doesn't give the enterprise department any autonomy or exemptions from the generally-applicable rules, so the accountant would review its bills in the same manner and apply the same standards.”
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