Over the past decade Barrow County firefighters have stood on local street corners with boots in hand to ask the public to donate money for the state’s burn victims and for local charities. Local residents and businesses have responded by donating more than $200,000 during 14 boot drives since 2000.
However, the money has flowed in and out of Barrow County Emergency Services for an entire decade with no county oversight.
Long-unresolved questions about the handling of boot-drive collections resurfaced in October, after former fire chief Mitch Kitchens applied to rejoin Barrow County Emergency Services as an entry-level firefighter/emergency medical technician.
Commissioner Ben Hendrix, who served on the Barrow County Board of Commissioners at the time of Kitchens’ resignation in 2007, sent an email to the current board on Oct. 4 and asked that his job application be put on hold until the matter could be discussed in a closed board session.
The email states that Kitchens resigned “in the midst of an investigation concerning missing funds from a Fire Department charity event” and that the investigation was dropped as a result of his resignation.
However, no executive session has occurred in the month since Hendrix sent the email.
A couple of commissioners have privately discussed the idea of ordering a forensic audit of the fire department’s accounts, but there reportedly has been no movement in that direction either. In response to the new wave of questions regarding so-called “clandestine” accounts and Kitchens’ alleged mismanagement of public donations, the
Barrow Journal requested and received access to all of the department’s bootdrive and other financial records since 2000, when he became fire chief.
An extensive review of the documents over the past few weeks did not reveal large amounts of missing funds. However, several bank statements — notably for some of the months when there was significant boot-drive activity — were missing, along with some backup documentation, making it impossible to determine the exact flow of cash through the two accounts that Kitchens opened in 2004 and 2007, but didn’t disclose until weeks before his April 2007 resignation.
The available records do raise several questions, some of which were brought to the administration’s attention by internal auditor Marilyn Golightly after a preliminary review of account ledgers and other documents days before Kitchens’ resignation. The previous administration and board apparently dropped the issue and never pursued finance department oversight of the Barrow Fire Foundation account, which still exists.
For more on this story, see the November 10 edition of the Barrow Journal
