The Sea Breeze Volunteer Fire Department in Irondequoit. The Sea Breeze Fire District in Irondequoit failed to keep basic accounting records or address questionable expenditures over several years, according to an audit report released recently by the state Comptroller’s Office.
The audit, which the office completed in February, covered the period between Jan. 1, 2016 and Feb. 22, 2018.The 20-page document portrayed a fire district that had loose record keeping and unclear policies for spending money, which ultimately were not followed.
For example, the district set a policy where credit and debit card expenses needed to be pre-approved by the board of commissioners. However, because there was no set policy in place to document those pre-approvals, the district had five debit card charges totalling nearly $5,000 on the books during the audit period with no records of approval by the commissioners.
Voter heads in to cast their ballot in the Mendon Fire District election on Tuesday, Dec. 8. On a Tuesday afternoon in December, Charlie Ennis donned a Vietnam Veteran baseball cap and a flannel shirt and made the short jaunt from his home off Latta Road in Greece to the firehouse down the street. He went to vote for a pair of commissioners in the North Greece Fire District, an annual exercise in civic duty Ennis figured he had completed for the last 25 years. Polls opened at 2 p.m., and when they closed seven hours later, Ennis was one of 361 people to cast a ballot in a race that included four candidates, according to the election results.