I’m kicking off my series of 30-minute interviews with the top St. Petersburg mayoral candidates today with a chat with Kathleen Ford. Here is an excerpt from the Q&A:
CL: Why run now?
Ford: We have experienced some incredible changes here locally, and the concern I have is the city finances, frankly. We have a current city policy that has allowed the gambling of our payroll. A lot of folks really don’t know about that yet, and i think there will be more in the press as more of the information is revealed as to what those policies were and what the ramifications were to the city of St. Petersburg.
How did the city do that?
There’s a concept called securities lending, and basically, the city had 39 loans out for $194 million of our operating revenue, and as you know, our operating budget general fund is approximately $200 million, more or less. So that’s the entire amount of our operational funds that were being allowed to be invested in some riskier investments, and we still have not seen publicly the report that was written by KPMG over a year ago [that audited those investments].
Do you suspect the city lost a lot of money in those investments?
$15 million to $30 million, and the fact that they can’t tell us how much is lost or where these funds are or how it happened is extremely troubling. …This is an additional layer of irresponsibility, carelessness and a lack of due diligence, and it still has not been addressed.
You can hear the entire interview in the cool little player on the top right hand side of this blog post or download it after the jump.
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