Current commissioners and the county controller are not only blaming the previous board for the debt, they are specifically pointing the finger at the previous president commissioner, Doug Lengenfelder.
Commissioner Tom Chernisky and B.J. Smith stood with the county controller, Ed Cernic, to point out all the flaws with the previous board that lead the county to its current almost $56 million dollars in debt.
They said Lengenfelder is the one to blame and they have the facts to back it up. The charts shown at the meeting show the 30 year history of the county’s general fund balance. Those numbers dive deeper into the red during Lengenfelder’s time in office.
The current commissioners admit Lengenfelder was paying off the debt, but doing so at a 1% rate, which would have taken the county more than 80 years to pay off.
They said funds were miscounted time and time again, and that an independent audit from Wessel and Company supports their claims.
“The long and short term county debt was only reduced by about a million dollars,” Cernic said. “So you have to be able to see that situation, what was happening. They weren’t paying bills. They were borrowing new money all the time.”
Cambria county commissioners voted to raise taxes this year. “Those tax dollars are taking care of all the previous years’ problems,” Cernic explained. “And it won’t be completed in one year. It’s gonna take multiple years for us to get out of there.”
Chernisky said they did not have a choice.
“Nobody wants to raise taxes,” he said. “You don’t come into office saying you want to raise taxes. But we either close the doors, go bankrupt or keep the doors open. We made the decision to keep the doors open.”
Chernisky was on the board the current commissioners are pointing fingers at.
“I was on the former board and actually myself and controller Cernic would educate that board of commissioners about the issues,” Chernisky said. “And guess what? Nothing was done. It was ignored.”
Still, Chernisky casts most of the blame on Lengenfelder.
“This county was running a deficit well before we even got in office and that deficit was — that off the books deficit was — exactly the same amount when we left office,” Lengenfelder said, “the six to eight million as stated by Mr. Cernic.”
“What you have for the last four years – the same auditing firm – but it was alright for four years,” said commissioner B.J. Smith. “But once you lose an election – and I’m getting kind of personal with this – then you wanna say funny numbers. Is that because you’re a sore loser?”
Lengenfelder scoffed at the jab: “Ha! Shame on them. …The lies and deceit and games that were being played up there, you know, it did bother me.”
One of the commissioners was not at Wednesday’s meeting, but the two that were present made a point of saying the three are all working together this time around.
