Some financial records for the town of Buckner are disorganized and unlabeled.
“It appears that newer storage items were stacked into the same room as the old without regard for what was being stored or where it was placed, resulting in something of a mess,” said Rick Childers, city administrator for the western Missouri town of about 3,000 people.
In Licking, near Fort Leonard Wood, “our old system has crashed and the paper documents were destroyed...” Clerk Renee Keaton wrote in an email.
And it’s unclear how Northwoods keeps records; calls to the North County municipality’s city office went unanswered, and there is no option to leave a message.
The Business Journal, in conjunction with the free-market think tank Show-Me Institute, asked 152 Missouri cities for information about all payments they’d made in the five years ended September 2017. The newspaper’s requests, made under the state’s Sunshine Law, began in late November.
