Norris gets ‘clean’ audit report for 2023-24
Norris achieved a “clean” audit for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024, according to a report the city’s auditor gave to the City Council on Monday night.
Travis Lowe of Pugh CPAs in Knoxville also said that everything required by the state for the required annual audit had been filed on time, and he reported that the city continues to be debt-free.
“It’s a good audit,” he told the council.
The city’s general fund finished the fiscal year with $2.4 million in assets and $139,000 in liabilities, and had a year-end general fund balance of $1.4 million, Lowe said.
During the fiscal year, the city had total expenditures of $2.4 million, with total revenue collections of $1.8 million, he said. The extra expenditures above general fund revenues were for capital projects, he noted.
Still appearing in the city’s audit report, though, is Norris’s ongoing noncompliance with state wastewater treatment regulations.
The city is working through a years-long project to correct the environmental violations, and Lowe said that problem will remain on the city’s audit reports until the state releases the city from further liability.
The wastewater problem listed in the audit report presented to the City Council on Monday night concerned a “Water Quality Control Act violation” that resulted in the city being fined by the state of Tennessee in 2022 over the dumping of contaminated sewage into nearby Buffalo Creek from the city’s sewage-treatment plant.
Lowe has noted over the past three audits that the sewage problem is being addressed by a multi-year action plan approved by the state.
Norris expects to spend up to $7 million to remedy the sewage issues, which were outlined by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation in a “director’s order” to the mayor in February 2022, which found the city in violation of water-quality regulations concerning discharges from the sewage-treatment plant on East Norris Road near Andersonville Highway.
