By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff
The Bonner County board of commissioners and members of the Fair Board met Nov. 24, for a special meeting to examine the fairgrounds’ finances following the recent onboarding of its new bookkeeper. Jennifer Wyman, who took on the role Nov. 14, reported on multiple errors discovered in the fair’s published financials, including improperly cleared checks and miscalculated profits and expenses.
The fairgrounds’ finances have been the subject of a yearslong controversy after allegations of misappropriated funds came to light in 2022, the investigation of which was complicated by the apparent suicide of then-Fairgrounds Director Darcey Smith that year. The commissioners approved a total audit of the fair’s finances in 2024, and have since worked with the Fair Board to institute new practices to improve transparency and proper financial planning.
As part of that process, the board previously hired Samantha Schmidt to act as the fair’s treasurer, beginning her tenure with a salary of $1,300 per month, Commissioner Asia Williams said at the Nov. 24 BOCC meeting. By the time Wyman and current Fair Board Treasurer Staci McBrayer took over for her in November, that number had jumped to $5,000 per month, despite the fact that Schmidt did not have a contract with the fair organization. Wyman is contracted at $1,200 per month, while McBrayer works as a volunteer.
Schmidt sent a letter to the fair Nov. 13 containing what was apparently her final $5,000 paycheck. According to Williams, Schmidt did not cash the check, believing — though unable to confirm — that she had been paid too many times. Neither Schmidt nor Wyman had determined to whom the money belonged as of press time.
“How does the bookkeeper not understand what check she ought [to have earned]?” asked Williams at the Nov. 24 meeting.
“Your bookkeeper, actually, in defense of the payment, says, ‘They never gave me a contract. They’re just paying me.’ Which is a little bit [of an] oxymoron for the bookkeeper to be getting money for something that’s not contracted,” Williams said. “You guys [the Fair Board] were aware of this, because I have asked, ‘What’s the updated contract? What duties is she doing today, at $5,000, that have increased progressively?’”
The $5,000 payment in question is one of several issues Wyman uncovered regarding how the fair has handled checks for the past several years. The organization has an outstanding ledger of checks that allegedly did not clear; however, Wyman could not verify whether that information was accurate, as “every check number is incorrect.”
“Were we verifying the name on the checks? Were we verifying the amount of the checks when we were clearing transactions? I don’t know that without going backwards,” said Wyman.
Having brought the confusion to the Fair Board’s attention, Wyman requested permission to review and correct the data, which is outside the scope of her current contract and will therefore incur to-be-determined additional charges. The Fair Board will consider giving Wyman a “not-to-exceed dollar amount” to work within while she verifies the checks and alters the subsequent financial statements.
Wyman has already uncovered “incorrect” information in the fair’s Fiscal Year 2024 financial reports, including “negatives on our accounts payable” and “large amounts on our accounts receivable.”
According to Wyman, many entries were incorrectly categorized in the fair’s QuickBooks accounts, throwing off the overall profit and expense tallies.
Based on the information apparently available to Wyman, she has determined that the fair loses money on most of its high-profile events. The 2024 Lost in the ‘50s concert cost the fair approximately $17,000 — not offset by revenue — and the organization lost an additional $94,000 during the 2024 fair week.
Based on those findings, Fair Board Chair Tim Mahan said that, in the future, the fair will prioritize more financially viable endeavors. The fairgrounds has already announced that it will not elect “rodeo royalty” in 2026, or likely host another Lost in the ’50s concert.
“2024 is the first year that [the fair manager] has actually been able to collect data; and, moving forward, we have a lot clearer picture now than we had on what things we intuitively knew — like that the concert was not a moneymaker,” said Mahan.
Though the fair is operating with approximate numbers, the financial reports are further thrown off by information that was apparently deleted from QuickBooks.
“There was an attempt to remove old, closed bank accounts off of the records; and, in that process, outstanding checks that were not cleared were voided,” said Wyman. “What that does is that removes that expense for whatever that period is from that period. These are items that were dated all the way back to 2023 — [the] majority of them were in 2024. You guys have an odd calendar year or fiscal year, so I recognize that it basically affected the prior two fiscal years of data.”
Though many of those checks represent “very small” amounts, each incorrect entry has compounded, altering total calculations by a yet unknown amount.
“There were also bill payment checks that were never cashed. Whether the vendor or the recipient received the check — that’s what you have to then investigate, and go through your ledger and make sure that that check didn’t get incorrectly cleared,” said Wyman.
Wyman did not give an estimate for how long it will take to rectify the incorrect information. In the meantime, the Fair Board will host a special meeting in the coming weeks to vote on the scope of — and budget for — her revisions.