OneColumbia set to get nearly $84,000 through June despite critique of its spending

Columbia City Council is set on Tuesday to finalize its promise to the arts advocacy group OneColumbia that it would get money to finish the fiscal year after an auditor questioned how the group spent meal taxes.

Council is to vote to take $83,800 from the general fund to pay for OneColumbia’s operation through June 30. How the organization would be funded after that has not been decided.

OneColumbia will receive the money every four weeks rather than every three months as it does when it uses meal taxes, which are paid largely by patrons of the city’s restaurants and bars.

The “professional services” agreement that council is to sign off on has a confidentiality provision that prohibits OneColumbia from releasing “(a)ll ... reports, information, data, records or documents of any kind.”

Instead, anyone who wants to see that information must request it from the city, even though OneColumbia is a non-profit group funded with public money but is not a part of city government.

City attorney Teresa Knox said those provisions are standard in other city professional services contracts – not exclusive to OneColumbia. “It puts an extra link so that we know about it,” Knox said of requests for information.

The nearly $84,000 will come from the general fund surplus, budget director Missy Caughman said.

The proposed agreement also states that OneColumbia will conduct its business of helping mostly small arts groups “in the order and in the manner that he or she determines is most effective and efficient without any city control over the details of (its) performance.”

A month ago, the organization was in trouble with some members of council who talked about cutting off its public income, which is nearly its entire budget. A compromise was reached in principle later in April that council would find money to keep OneColumbia operating through the end of the fiscal year. Its funding after June 30 will be discussed as council works its way through the 2016-2017 budget.

The criticism followed an outside auditing firm’s report that for the second year questioned OneColumbia’s use of meal taxes, often called “hospitality” taxes, especially for the purchase of alcoholic beverages.

WebsterRogers elevated its criticism in its audit of the 2014-2015 fiscal year to a deficiency in the city’s bookkeeping procedures. The firm said state law barred how OneColumbia had spent some meal taxes. The arts group countered that it has a legal opinion from a former city attorney that authorized the expenditures.

OneColumbia also got public money for other expenses that no other meal tax recipient received, said Libby Gober, who oversees the city’s reimbursements to groups that get the funds.

OneColumba director Lee Snelgrove told The State newspaper that his organization had spent nearly $9,000 on food and beverages, including for its board meetings and board retreats.

In its first five years of operation, OneColumbia has received almost $670,000 in meal taxes from the city to cover essentially all its expenses, records show.