The City of Manteca financial house is close to being in order.

The 2022 audit is now scheduled to be presented to the Manteca City Council when they meet Tuesday, Feb. 20.

At the same time, concurrent work on the 2023 audit dependent on previous audits being done correctly and completed, is on target to be presented to the council in June or July.

That means 3½ years the city has spent diligently sorting out a bookkeeping mess and instituting “good accounting practices” as well as recommendations in a scathing San Joaquin County Grand Jury report is finally coming to an end.

And when it does, a financial department brought up to widely accepted accounting standards will be in place to keep Manteca’s books up-to-date and all expenditures, revenues, and any interfund borrowing and payments will be accounted for in the proper places going forward.

Neither the Grand Jury nor teams of auditors uncovered malfeasance or illegal activity.

All revenues and expenditures have basically been accounted for with the essential caveat that they are entered in the right places.

The catch up in audits in the past few years has given the council growing confidence to make decisions to commit to spending plans using growth fees and such.

That said, every council member has indicated they want auditing to be current before embarking on major expenditure plans such as committing to the actual groundbreaking of a new police headquarters.

 In October of 2021, the City of Manteca was what one might call a hot mess.

The city had just terminated a city manager after 139 days on the job. At that point the city had gone through four city managers in 3 years and 3 months after the 2018 election.

A high rate of widespread turnover effectively had a revolving door in place in much of the city’s senior management staff offices. More than half of the city’s top positions had acting department heads

Manteca was still getting out from under a financial mess created by a combination of a failure to have a succession plan in place in the finance department and inadequate oversight from the city manager’s office coupled with chronic understaffing.

In late 2020 weeks before a general sales tax measure was to be decided, then City Manager Miranda Lutzow dropped an October surprise on voters.

The city — she said — couldn’t accurately properly account for over $60 million.

While audits eventually have shown that no money was pilfered or used in an inappropriate manner and the amount of funds entered incorrectly was substantially less, the finance department was clearly in disarray.

There were double budget entries on both the expense and revenue sides, departments were keeping track of their own expenses, outside audits weren’t being done in a timely manner, interfund borrowing wasn’t being paid back, fees for services such as water and sewer weren’t being adjusted to keep up with costs, and the general ledger was a disaster.

The city knew how much money it had but didn’t know where it legally belonged.

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com