Which "outside firm"?

The new city administration is rooting around the building and rearranging the furniture and whatnot.  They have to go clear the old mayor's creepy murder yearbooks out of the office so the new mayor has a place to put her creepy altar. That sort of thing. It's all very normal.  Another normal thing that happens when a new administration comes in is they like to pick up the piles of money laying around in one corner and see if they like them better in a different corner.  In this case, we're looking at some $31 million in FEMA and HUD grants to see if maybe they need to live in their own little department.

Grants are currently managed within the department that receives them, both on the finance and the program side. Montano said he will move the financial aspects of grants into a centralized system that would pay for projects out of a separate fund.

Montano said he's still in the "discovery" phase of trying to determine whether the city can recoup the $31.3 million from the Federal Emergency Management Association and the Department of Housing and Development. There haven't been problems in that area before, but Montano said that when new administrations take office, there is always a significant effort to examine what the previous administration did to ensure grants were managed correctly.

"There haven't been problems," probably won't be any problems. But the new people like things the way they like them and it's obviously well within their prerogative to find out what suits them best.  Again, all very normal.  None of this is too important other than the fact that when you do go in and move all the money around, inevitably a little bit of change drops out.  So it might be interesting to note whose pockets it falls into.

Montano said he's contracting with an outside firm to ensure the city can match those reimbursements correctly, and he wants to change the city's practice of paying for grant-funded expenses out of the general fund. The CAO said he's concerned that relying on the general fund if grant reimbursements don't come through could be problematic, and he plans to establish new financial controls to avoid using the general fund as a "backstop."

Not that it's a huge deal. It's just that it's probably the most interesting thing in the story. The new CAO wants to separate grant disbursements from the general fund. Okay. Maybe. My guess is they might find that harder to do than they think but it's probably a fine idea.  But, in the meantime, they're paying some accounting (?) consultant X number of dollars.  That's fine, too. But I like to read the names of these firms in stories like this in case they become relevant later.

Oh also, there's some stuff about city credit cards in this story. But everybody agrees that's last year's news so do with that what you like.