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State Auditor presents city of Melbourne with PIE award

By Robert Maharry 4 min read

MELBOURNE -- As he arrived at the Melbourne Public Library on Wednesday afternoon, State Auditor Rob Sand joked that if he ate much more pie, he'd double in size, but he was doing it for a worthy cause: to promote his Public Innovations and Efficiencies, or PIE, program aimed at helping governmental bodies around Iowa save taxpayer money.

Melbourne was recognized as a "Most Improved" award winner after implementing several cost-cutting measures, some of them as simple as printing on both sides of a sheet instead of just one. With City Clerk Mary Pothast, city council members Gary Fricke and Carrie White and Angie Gibbs with the Melbourne first responders in attendance among others, Sand, a Democrat, presented both a certificate of recognition and an actual pie, a pecan from the Bake Shoppe in Windsor Heights.

"The idea is the city clerk fills out a checklist of basic money saving practices, checks yes for what you're doing and no for what you're not. You're then entered into the PIE contest, and because you participated twice and improved, you got the most improved city award, so congratulations," Sand said. "And if you have any good ideas, we add those to the program, any ways to save money, and we call them PIE recipes. So if you come up with any and you want to let us know about them, we'll spread them across the state."

After posing for a group photo, Sand and Pothast talked a little more in-depth about some of the ways they've been striving to become more efficient, especially in a small town like Melbourne (pop. 786 at the 2020 census) where public resources are already limited. In addition to two-sided printing, the city has installed energy-efficient furnaces at its facilities and replaced doors in the library, and the plan is to add LED lights at city hall and the rec center.

"I can't tell you how much it is (in a dollar amount), but if you look at any of those savings on the Energy Star efficiency, there's gotta be some savings," Pothast said.

Melbourne officials haven't sent out any "PIE recipes" of their own yet, but Pothast commended Sand's office for the ideas they share with municipalities across the state from communities both large and small, citing Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, Dickinson County and Muscatine as examples.

"The whole idea really is while we wanna be open to collecting ideas, really what we wanna do is spread them because people who are city clerks, people who are on council or who were on council, they're typically not getting paid or they're not getting paid much," he said. "They've got a full time job somewhere else. They've got a life, and they can't sit down and twiddle their thumbs for a while and come up with a big list of ideas to save money. But we're a bigger office. We have, in our law, an authority to promote efficiency, and so we have the ability to go and put together a very long list of things that you can do to save money."

And with local dollars seemingly getting tighter and tighter each year, making the most out of them will be the name of the game going forward.

"Resources are becoming so much more limited, the dollars. Even though assessments and stuff have gone up, we're getting a smaller and smaller portion, and everybody needs to do that in order to make that dollar stretch a little further," Pothast said. "So if we save and don't have to buy a case of paper, it's only $50 to you, but (it's a) big difference."

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Contact Robert Maharry

at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.

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