Devon Schmidt says completing annual comprehensive report on time was city’s biggest finance achievement since 2018
Devon Schmidt recently took over as Durango’s chief financial officer, but she was no stranger to the role. She served as the city’s acting CFO six weeks after starting with the city when the former financial director resigned in 2019 amid allegations of embezzlement that later proved accurate. (Jerry McBride/Durango Herald)
Jerry McBride
When the city of Durango was rocked by an embezzlement scandal in 2019, it felt like a gut punch to staff in the city’s financial services department.
Trust was broken between the public at large and city financial staff who had worked with Julie Brown, the former financial director who pleaded guilty in November 2021 to embezzling over $712,000 from town coffers over the course of 11 years.
But the department has come a long way in the few short years since the embezzlement, said Durango chief financial officer Devon Schmidt.
Schmidt had only been with the city six weeks when word of the embezzlement got out. She quickly stepped in to fill the vacancy left by Brown, who resigned that November. And that temporary acting role eventually became the permanent one she holds today. She was appointed as the permanent chief financial officer in August.
Since the embezzlement, the city has taken a renewed approach to budgeting for outcomes and has adapted more advanced tools for managing finances with transparency.
In 2020, the city used Excel spreadsheets embedded in Microsoft Word documents to manage its budget. Today, it relies on OpenGov, an online platform accessible by the public that displays adopted budgets and amendments, and is updated daily.
Schmidt said the scandal brought the financial services team closer together and led to a stronger team dynamic present today.
The city adopted better cross-training methods and accounting controls, or procedures that help maintain accurate financial statements, and staff gradually improved its annual comprehensive financial reports.
The year 2022 was the first time since 2018 that the financial services department completed its annual comprehensive financial report on time with just one material finding by independent auditors.
“It was a special time because of the people who were on the team,” Schmidt said. “It was kind of all hands on deck. ‘Hey, let’s keep this city going and let’s get this stuff done.’ It’s (the embezzlement) an absolutely unfortunate event that happened to our community. But everybody really rallied together to see it through.”
She said the financial services department continues working toward process improvements. For example, In 2020 and in prior years, the city would often roll capital projects forward into the next year’s budget. That practice stopped in 2021.
“What that does is it allows the current council and the community to have more visibility into those projects every year if we’re re-appropriating them, or in order to do an appropriation,” Schmidt said.
She said getting the annual comprehensive financial report done on time last year is one of the financial department’s greatest achievements in the wake of the 2019 embezzlement scandal.
“The team was just fantastic. There were nights we were here until 8 or 9 o’clock at night. We would still be smiling and they would still be smiling. It was fun,” she said. “ … And to have only one finding. When we talked to the auditors on the auditing … they said you can do 99 things right but you can still have that one finding. That’s our goal moving forward.”
She said the team culture that formed after the embezzlement, which left financial department staff with an incomplete annual financial report that still needed to be finished and filed, is what makes the department great today. And she said city manager José Madrigal, who joined the city in December 2020, has helped build that culture.
“We really do feel like a small family. We care about each other. To see that transition has been really impactful for us too,” Schmidt said.
City finance is all about the numbers for Schmidt because numbers don’t lie, she said. Finalizing budgets is like a puzzle that requires working with all of the city’s departments to figure out how to make all the pieces fit.
She said she learns something new at her job every day by working with various department staff.
But city finance is also about public trust, and responsible stewardship of public funds, Schmidt said. She grew up in the small town of Bailey. The Colorado town had a great sense of community, something she values in Durango as well. Contributing to that sense of community is essential to her job.
“To be able to give back to the community that I live in, that my kids live in, that my family lives in, and we’re able to really serve in that public manner is really neat,” she said.