In a March 12 memo to Salida City Council, Mayor P.T. Wood and City Administrator Larry Lorentzen, Jodi McClurkin responded to former mayor Jim LiVecchi’s guest opinion published in the March 7 Mountain Mail.
Ark Valley Voice recently obtained a copy of the memo, in which McClurkin, director of finance and administrative services for the city of Salida, addresses “issues that should be brought to light regarding Mr. LiVecchi’s statements.”
In the The Mail’s guest opinion, LiVecchi states, “The city recently completed a thorough analysis of every invoice Mr. Kahn submitted. After cross-referencing 95-plus matters and more than 20,000 time entries, the city concluded there was never any double billing or overbilling.”
In her memo McClurkin responds, “I stated in the executive memo to the council on January 9, 2018, that invoices and/or statements between ‘April 2016- September 2017’ have not been [reviewed]. And only that I believed the sample I had taken between October through December 2018 were representative.”
McClurkin also maintains that she never said, in LiVecchi’s words, “The city concluded there was never any double billing or overbilling.”
“It is impossible to determine if there was ever any overbilling,” she writes. “To determine if this were true would require firsthand, visual knowledge of Mr. Kahns’ time spent on each matter, time in discussion with others required in city business affairs, time spent pondering issues and outcomes, etc.
“Obviously this claim is beyond the realm of reason.”
Regarding double-billing, McClurkin again references her Jan. 9 memo, which addresses the perception that Kahn might have over-billed the city. She writes, “It was the chaotic character of (Kahn’s) invoices and the statements that caused doubt to be cast.”
When asked about the March 12 memo, Mayor Wood referred to it as “a clarification of procedure.”
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