Story included misrepresentation of fact

Dear editor,

The article title “Council: Revisions made to golf pro contract” on Page 6 of the latest edition (of the Mountain Home News) has a significant misrepresentation of fact.

From paragraph 6: “Previous stories published in the Mountain Home News also revealed concerns with regards to the money needed to keep the golf course operating. Sources showed some of the funding came from enterprise funds to cover the costs of water, sewer and sanitation services.”

The statement above is not only false but has overt connotation that financial wrongdoing has occurred.

To be clear, no water, wastewater or sanitation enterprise funds have been used to fund golf course operations.

The term “enterprise funds” has an express definition in municipal governmental budgeting. These funds cannot be utilized for any other function except for which they are expressly permitted and intended in their respective budget segments. The various layers of city staff, legal team and third party auditors would never allow this to occur.

Enterprise fund usage defined: Enterprise Funds are used to account for activities that charge a fee for goods or services. Generally accepted accounting practices require the use of enterprise funds for activities whose principal revenue sources include: debt backed solely by user fees and charges (such as revenue bonds that are not secondarily secured by the full faith and credit of the government); or revenue received from services in which the government is legally required or has a policy to recover the costs of providing the service with user fees or charges (including capital costs such as depreciation or debt service). Enterprise funds are created for water, sewer and sanitation.

General funds (property tax dollars) and Enterprise funds (water and wastewater service fees) are not synonymous terms. For clarity, previous budget years saw transfers from the general fund to meet the deficit needs at the course.

In other recent articles, the Mountain Home News has published similar misstatements of funding sources pertaining to the City pool and the toddler park upgrades at Richard Aguirre park.

I implore the Mountain Home News to be more mindful of the specific details of budgetary topics such as this.

Regards,

– City Councilman

Scott Harjo

Editor’s note: Unfortunately, the newspaper relied on the accuracy of the information it received from outside sources related to this story featured in the Aug. 28 edition and was unable to double check this information with other sources before the newspaper went to print. The newspaper staff regrets this error.