Outspoken Citizen Gets Saddled With Oceanside’s Ledgers

Sandy Messett asked for it, and she got it. In eye-glazing glory. Thousands of pages, a blur of endless numbers. A mystery of red ink just begging to be unraveled.

The Oceanside resident who knows her way around a ledger recently appeared before the City Council, indignantly demanding to know how her city suddenly found itself facing an unforeseen $5.8-million budget deficit.

“I got mad,” explained Messett, whose pulled-back hair and half glasses stationed at mid-nose give her the ye-shall-obey bearing of a prairie schoolmarm.

When her questions drew somewhat blank expressions--maybe because she was one of 40 upset people who verbally pelted the punchy council over the budget that night--she decided to push the point.

Messett volunteered to personally examine the city’s financial records and get to the bottom of the budget mess that’s already axed 95 municipal jobs and reduced city police and fire services.

“The only way I could get answers to my questions and find out where the money went was to offer me and my time to look at the books,” Messett said.

Mayor Larry Bagley instantly accepted her offer.

“He had a smile on his face,” Messett recalled.

As he smiled, he also opened his arms wide, like he was coyly inviting a fluffy little lamb toward a sharp pair of shears.

In a later interview, Bagley commented there was no reason not to take Messett up on her offer. “You get answers from strange places sometimes,” he said.

The mayor thought that, after all the city staff reports about the budget crisis, it couldn’t hurt to get a fresh opinion. “I thought, well, let’s get some outside influence . . . something might even verge on the truth.”

So, for the past 3 weeks, Sandy Messett, citizen with a mission, has spent 14 to 16 hours almost every day searching for the sickness and the cure in the city’s ailing $227-million budget.

She sequesters herself in a Finance Department conference room, surrounded by forbidding shelves lined with books of records with such tantalizing titles as “Audit Trails” (not a Western by Louis L’Amour) and “Balance Forward” (not an aerobics primer).

One file drawer is intriguingly labeled, “Fixed Asset Inventory Revisions,” and, although reading such records would be cruel and unusual punishment for most people, Messett isn’t most people.

“I love a challenge,” said Messett, a 44-year-old native of Massachusetts.

She believes she’s the right person to decode budget hieroglyphics, having been a professional bookkeeper who is now a self-employed financial consultant to business.

When she’s not hunched over the books at City Hall, she’s home, scrutinizing city receipts and expenditures recorded on reams of computer printout paper until the pink sky of morning.

She has cleared the deck of mundane distractions.

“My husband and son took over household duties,” Messett said.

Temporary freedom from chores isn’t the only improvement in her life. She’s so absorbed that her smoking has waned from 2 1/2 packs of Saratoga Menthols a day down to a few slim butts.

What she’s uncovered so far, Messett will give only a sneak preview until she reports her findings to the council Wednesday.

Is there actually a deficit?

“Oh, yeah. It’s for real,” she nodded. “It’s really been spent.”

Is it better or worse than she expected?

“I am showing on the boards $7 million in the hole,” she said.

Messett believes she knows what went wrong. The fundamental problem:

Oceanside has gone through five city managers in as many years, and the absence of an experienced budget gatekeeper has allowed many city departments to get rubber-stamp council approval for overspending.

She said she will give the council recommendations on how to improve the city’s budget accountability.

Being Oceanside’s budget detective isn’t the role Messett envisioned for herself when she moved here from Whittier 2 1/2 years ago.

She planned to be an ordinary citizen until news coverage of the deficit situation--including the grounding of police helicopters and the elimination of a fire engine company--got her riled at City Hall.

“It irked me,” she said. “I thought, ‘Are these people for us?’ ”

Messett thinks she’s at liberty to deliver an objective analysis without fear. “I’m not afraid to speak. I’m not afraid of getting fired or not getting paid because none of those apply,” she said.

Her efforts have drawn mixed reviews.

One Finance Department employee said, “Sandy Messett? Oh, yeah, (eyes rolling) the one who said she could find all the problems.”

Yet she’s taken somewhat seriously by city officials who have been explaining the deficit was caused by city spending coupled with declining revenue.

Sales tax revenue has dropped because of the deployment of thousands of Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton and the recession has hobbled development-related fees to the city.

Carl Husby, the city’s finance director, has answered Messett’s questions and helped guide her through the budget thicket. “This is her thing, I have no quarrel with it,” he said, adding that the financial records are public information.

And beside, Husby is a veteran of the kinds of questions Messett asks. “I have auditors here all the time. I get used to it,” he said.

Messett said she’s enjoying herself and hopes the city has further use for her talents once the budget work is concluded. But, in the meantime, she’s getting little rest.

“I just want to get to the bottom line,” she said.