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In a month, Dunkirk's new comptroller has quickly become the "go-to" for city government financial information. Tracy Smith-Dengler has apparently been around long enough to see troubles outside of the ledgers.
Smith-Dengler criticized City Hall's working culture in a comment tacked on at the end of her Common Council Finance Committee report Monday.
After noting that she feels very welcome at City Hall, she said, "There are a few things we are not doing well." The comptroller first stated that the city is not consistently following state General Municipal Law in its purchase orders.
Smith-Dengler then said, "Collectively, as a team, we are not communicating as well as we could together. There is a lot of contentiousness, a lot of animosity."
She added that a professional, cordial workplace is "hugely important to me."
The workplace culture comments came at the end of a report where Smith-Dengler said the city still has $10.8 million available to appropriate in the current budget. Dunkirk has not yet received $6.5 million of its budgeted $22.9 million of revenue, she added.
The comptroller said she has met with about half of the city's department heads over their 2027 budgets. "We need to circle back and cover the other half before we finalize the mayor's projections," she said.
Councilman-at-Large Nick Weiser, the Finance Committee chair, said the new proposed deadline for Common Council adoption of the budget is Nov. 30. He thought it might be smart to move it to the first week of December in order to avoid potential Thanksgiving travel issues. The traditional deadline for Dunkirk's city budget adoption is Dec. 15.
"The things we're most concerned about are getting the (budget proposal) review and public hearing sessions moved up so we can get the budget to the Office of the State Comptroller sooner," Weiser said.
Smith-Dengler also touched on the ongoing installation of the city's new GovSense software. City officials are confident that the system will make finances easier to understand and track.
Smith-Dengler said GovSense representatives were in City Hall last week for "very intensive sessions." They got direct feedback from city employees that will "allow them to do final configurations."
The comptroller declared, "We need for everybody to be in there and testing this system" ahead of a planned rollout in early October. The Common Council approved the new software late last year but its rollout has been delayed for months. City officials have said gathering and getting all of the city's financial information into GovSense has proven a tougher task than anticipated.
Smith-Dengler noted the new system will track who has logged on, and when they did it. "If we find someone is lagging (on testing it), we'll be in touch to nudge a little bit," she said.