ST. LOUIS — Some offices in the St. Louis Development Corp. and Community Development Administration needed to improve their record keeping and monitoring procedures, Missouri Auditor Nicole Galloway said in a report released Tuesday.
found no major problems at SLDC and the St. Louis CDA, giving the offices an overall rating of “good,†the second-highest general rating from the state auditor’s office.
But auditors did find internal accounting procedures that needed improvement in the city’s land bank, the Land Reutilization Authority, and the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority. Both agencies fall under the SLDC umbrella.
The report said the LRA, which obtains title to tax delinquent property and works to sell it back to private owners, did not adequately track receipts from land sales. And it said some money for land sold by the LCRA during the fiscal year ended June 30, 2019, was deposited in the LRA’s bank account. The real estate holdings of both entities are managed by the same staff.
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In another SLDC department, staff weren’t issuing receipts for application fees developers pay for tax abatement and other development incentives, the audit found.
The audit also recommended LRA update its land price policies, which are a decade old. LCRA should rebid a management contract for the parking garages it owns downtown. The LCRA is on a month-to-month contract with a parking management company that has held the contract since 1983, according to the audit.
In its response, SLDC said it had instituted better receipt tracking and other accounting controls at LRA and LCRA. It’s also updating its pricing policies for LRA land and plans to discuss issuing a request for proposals for parking operators by the end of March.
The audit also included a review of the Community Development Administration, which is a direct part of city government and not SLDC. Auditors recommended better recordkeeping of cash received there, too. It also noted that CDA personnel failed to examine at least one entity sharing part of a Community Development Block Grant, federal grants allocated locally by CDA.
In response, the CDA said it would file and record receipts more quickly and ensure monitoring visits are performed for agencies receiving CDBG money. It said that a staff member had left, which is why the missed review noted by auditors occurred.
The auditor’s office noted that the CDA said it would make similar improvements after a 2018 audit, but that fixes were not entirely effective.
Auditors also noted that the SLDC does not have a record retention policy for electronic communication such as text messages and personal email accounts where official city business is conducted. SLDC said it would “await the development of the city’s policy regarding retention of electronic communications†and structure it based on that policy.
