Hawthorne still without budget

City manager targets mid-March

If all goes well, the City of Hawthorne’s budget should be balanced and ready by mid-March, recently hired Interim City Manager Ellen Vause said.

“I have had an opportunity to edit the revenues and am currently working on the expenditures,” she said. “What I bring forward, I want to be accurate.”

Currently, the City of Hawthorne is about one-third of the way through its fiscal year without an approved balanced budget.

After meeting with Suzanne Gable and John Brower from the Alachua County Office of Management and Budget, Vause announced that the plan to replenish the Wild Spaces and Public Places money is to pay $5,000 monthly until the account has been fully funded. The city’s Wild Spaces and Public Places funds, which have restricted uses, had been co-mingled with the city’s general funds and apparently had been spent on unauthorized expenditures.

At the previous Hawthorne City Commission meeting on Feb. 1, the commission made a motion to create a separate bank account designated for the Wild Spaces program to ensure that the money is where it should be.

Vause quoted Gable and Brower saying, “We have our game plan and we have to adhere to our game plan.”