Resident urges Swain County to track labor costs and audit animal shelter; staff provide project numbers

Fred Crawford of Whittier asked the Swain County Board of Commissioners on Feb. 3 to adopt a policy requiring the county to track internal labor on capital projects and to commission an audit of the animal shelter project so taxpayers can know the full cost.

Crawford said county crews did a significant portion of construction but that their time was recorded under operating or maintenance budgets, not capital accounting. "If county labor wasn't tracked to the shelter, then one of two things happen," he said: "Either the shelter looks cheaper on paper than it actually is, or the cost got shoved into the maintenance budget, making it look more expensive than it actually is."

Crawford cited government accounting rules and the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) requirement that capital assets reflect all costs, including direct labor and associated indirect costs such as benefits.

County staff and the interim manager responded that some employees who work on special projects have a separate budget line and that the shelter’s budget and a supporting spreadsheet showed a budgeted amount of $500,000 and a reported total of $647,000, including about $120,000 for site preparation. Staff estimated salary and benefits for a relevant department at roughly $351,000 and said approximately 28 weeks of staff time on the shelter would amount to roughly $189,000 in salary/benefits.

Why it matters: Uncounted labor can understate the cost of new capital assets, affecting asset valuation, maintenance budgeting and the transparency of taxpayer spending. Crawford argued that combining or misallocating labor costs could depress the reported value of the county’s assets and, he said, could ultimately affect the county’s credit rating.

What officials said (direct quotes): Fred Crawford: "When the project was approved, we were told using county crews would save money, so a lot of the construction work was done by them. But according to what we've heard here multiple times, that county labor was never tracked to the animal shelter project."

Staff (paraphrase): Staff said some project labor is kept in a separate special-project budget and provided the spreadsheet totals and salary/benefit estimates noted above.

Next steps: Commissioners asked the finance director and county staff to review the applicable statutes and accounting rules to determine whether a formal labor-tracking policy or an audit is appropriate; no formal vote to order an audit was taken during the work session.