HUTTO — A software glitch that led to errors in the town’s budget posted to Hutto’s website in September sparked some old arguments anew at City Council this past week.
While the inaccuracies didn’t result in a change to the approved budget, correcting those issues led to an emotional exchange among some council members, who thought they had put the contentious discussion behind them.
By law, the Fiscal Year 2024-25 budget had to be locked into place by Oct. 1.
“These are things we had talked about in the budget discussion. It was mainly just really more of a paperwork error or a tool error, where it didn’t get captured correctly, and we’re just making sure we’re recording it, right?” Mayor Pro Tem Peter Gordon said at the Thursday, Nov. 21, council session. “It’s not like we’re adding all these to the plan that we never talked about.”
City Manager James Earp confirmed the problem stemmed from unfamiliarity with new budget software, and said approval from the council means the published budget would be corrected and the issue fixed for future budget postings.
Meanwhile, staff members explained how the mistakes occurred.
“During the budget process when the budget book got finalized, it excluded our capital-improvements budget, or some were included and had errors, so at this point we wanted to present these to you as we discussed in the budget process and amend the budget to include those,” said Director of Finance Alberta Barrett at the meeting Thursday, Nov. 21.
The issue resulted in corrections to seven funds all involving capital-improvement projects.
“All of this data was visible in the software. It wasn’t until we exported it into the PDF that those got missed because there’s toggles you’ve got to turn on to push it to the PDF, and that’s effectively what the issue was. It was in the budget we talked about,” Earp said. “All the math was included. It’s just when we published the actual, official document that y’all adopted, these did not push in and got lost in the shuffle.”
The council approved the budget Sept. 12 after weeks of often heated discussions.
“We did a month of nothing, and then we tried to cram all the budget work into a night, and every five minutes we’re calling the vote and we ended up passing a budget, and subsequently we started having questions, what’s in the budget, what happened here, what happened there,” said Mayor Mike Snyder. “I hope next year we slow down, we take our time to read it as a council, and ask questions in public. I always feel it’s best to have questions asked before we pass the budget and not after.”
Snyder’s statement, which addressed the entire budget process rather than the immediate issue of the software glitch, prompted a response from Councilman Randal Clark.
“For you to insinuate that because we took a vote in one night that would have avoided this, it’s just factually untrue,” Clark said, adding that such sentiments contribute to public confusion and distrust of elected officials.
City Attorney Dorothy Palumbo reminded the two men to follow the public agenda and refrain from back-andforth comments.
