In May, the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners authorized Interim Administrator Richard Lewis to create a finance and accounting department. And last month, newly appointed fulltime Finance Director Cathy Hartesvelt promised the county board that she would “build (them) a department.”
Since then, the county hired a new assistant finance director, Michael Birkmeier, and account clerk, Jodi Logan. Birkmeier and Logan started Tuesday. They also hired a new human resources (HR) manager, Jennifer Kane, who started a day earlier.
“For the first time in two years, thanks to a lot of work from the clerk’s office, and the treasurer’s office, and from Cathy and the administrator, we are fully staffed. We have a finance department. We have an HR department,” Board Chairman Ty Wessell said Tuesday. “That’s a day to celebrate, I think.”
Hartesvelt was named finance director by Lewis in July after over nine months as interim director starting when the previous full-time director, Sean Cowan, left. She served as Cowan’s assistant director, and before he started at the county, she was interim director for another six months. Her years of experience and support from the board suggest that the department may be in good hands.
But if the finance department didn’t exist until it was “created” in May of this year, who or what were the county’s finance directors directing this entire time? The county board appointed its first finance director, the current Chief Deputy County Clerk Jennifer Zywicki, two and a half years earlier in January 2022.
When the newspaper asked Interim Administrator Richard Lewis, he admitted that he couldn’t account for what happened before he started as interim administrator in April. And turnover in county administration and the finance department effectively means there is no one person in a leadership role who can provide an overview.
The administrator who hired the county’s first finance director, Chet Janik, left in December 2022. His successor, Deb Allen, resigned in April this year. The finance director position has been rotating even faster. There have been five directors in just over two years: Darcy Weaver, Jared Prince, Zywicki, Cowan, and Hartesvelt.
One constant through all this has been Clerk Michelle Crocker, the longest serving county clerk in the state. Crocker also handled the county’s finances and human resources (HR) before the county board agreed to explore establishing separate departments for these roles as a late addition to their May 2021 meeting agenda, while Crocker was on vacation.
Several commissioners – including Ty Wessell, who also served prior to being re-elected in 2022 – admitted this transition was “poorly planned.” But according to comments by former Administrator Janik and Steve Peacock of the county’s advisory firm Rehmann, many counties initially assign these responsibilities to the clerk before creating more departments as they grow in population.
Crocker, however, said at a June special board meeting that she sees the stripping of duties from her department as a political ploy. At the same meeting, Crocker strongly encouraged the board to immediately give Lewis the freedom to start hiring personnel or else the county would start “going backwards” and have “even more bedlam.”
“Unless this board is going to step up and acknowledge that this was done on a whim for political purposes and nothing else, I think you need to keep (Lewis) in place,” Crocker said at the June 13 special session.
Elaborating on this comment to the newspaper, Crocker said that she felt that the county needed a single administrator for stability during the creation of the finance and HR departments. For now, she declined to go on the record about the political motives at play.
Ultimately, the board took the second option. They allowed Lewis to hire Hartesvelt as finance director less than a month later. Hartesvelt previously served under the clerk as an accounting and payroll specialist.
Former County Administrator Janik recommended against this in March. Janik felt this appointment would feed rumors among government center staff that Clerk Crocker still controls the county’s purse strings.
After the previous finance director, Cowan, resigned, the board hired a third party to conduct an employee climate/culture survey. According to the survey, 54 out of 85 respondents said that the clerk was refusing to give the finance and HR directors access to personnel records, computer systems, and other documents. Twenty-five respondents said finance directors were leaving because of Crocker, Hartesvelt, and Zywicki.
Although the consultant tallied up the number of employees who identified these issues, at least two commissioners felt they never provided the full raw data from the survey. Nonetheless, County Prosecutor Joseph Hubbell, Probate Judge Marian Kromkowski, Register of Deeds Jennifer Grant, Sheriff Michael Borkovich, and Treasurer John Gallagher said the findings were accurate.
In a Jan. 16 letter to the board signed by these five department heads, they “commit(ted) to the prior board approved decision to move forward with the separation of finance and human resource from the responsibility of the county clerk’s office.”
These claims are also reinforced by a September 2023 report from the county’s auditor, Rehmann. According to the report, Crocker still “governed system access controls” for their accounting software, managed the distribution of checks, and did federal grant compliance work. The firm also recommended that the clerk transfer payroll files prior to May 2022 to the HR department.
For her part, Crocker absolutely denies having a poor working relationship with Cowan and that most county staff who participated in the survey were not in the position to know the details. She says that she has complied with the transition of finance and HR duties from her office to separate departments, although she sees it as a poorly planned move and a result of backdoor politics.
“Everything the current county board is doing has been legal,” Crocker told the newspaper Wednesday. “I have not been trying to stand in the way and resist it.”
Ultimately, Crocker believes that the decision to separate finance and HR from the clerk’s office had a negative impact on the staff serving under her. She believes that the county has consistently underestimated the difficulties of creating separate departments and notes that she has volunteered her assistance at every turn.
The newspaper recently followed up with Lewis to confirm that the county implemented the Rehmann report recommendations. Lewis said that Crocker has given system access controls and the distribution of checks to the finance department and administration. An updated federal award grant policy that the board approved last month did the same. The clerk’s office retains the payroll files, however.
With Lewis as interim administrator and Hartesvelt as finance director, the county’s fledging finance department appears to be in working order. Whether the interdepartmental cooperation will continue under the next full-time administrator remains to be seen.
