I thought the state auditor did an excellent job on the what. Here's all the things that happened. Really bad, really bad, bad. Um the auditor did a fantastic job over the months really digging in deep and finding stuff that honestly I had no idea was going on. ... Womble Bond Dickinson is into the what and I mean the why and the how. And that's very important, especially if you're trying to fix problems and situations. You need to understand the whole picture.

I believe something that both of those resources did, which was important, was to illustrate what I would call an implementation gap. So, we do and we've talked about this as a body fairly frequently. We have a lot of policy and a lot of those policies just weren't followed.

For me it would be two words, culture and transparency. And on day one the mayor put forward a process and a for us to stream everything we do.

He was a master at making sure he had information from staff and he had information from council and he determined who got what information. That was a big problem and that was corrected on day one when we swore in Russ Overton as the interim manager.

I don't believe that it's accurate to classify the culture of our staff as one of extravagant spending. I believe that what we had was pockets of poor decisions and poor money management that we need to address. But, I would I stand by the fact that our staff works diligently to deliver the best product, the best services possible, and to do that at the most reasonable cost they can without compromising safety or quality.

All the damage that has been done with the extravagant expenses has minimal impact on the tax rate. Those expenditures, the extravagant expenses, what has a bigger impact was the information he withheld from us. We haven't hired a police officer in 10 years. That and he kept telling us we are fine. We are fine. We haven't built a new fire station. We are fine. We are fine. And now we find out instead of a 5-minutes response time, we have a 12-minute response time out west. That's a problem, and that's what we got to dig ourselves out of, and that's how he impacted the tax rate, not with the extravagant expenses, but I totally agree it was horrifying.

I think people want to pin blame on somebody and I'm getting a lot of it. Uh but I can tell you that a lot of it has to do with a council-manager form of government, which is all the municipalities in North Carolina, most mid-size cities in the nation. And that vulnerability exists in all of our brothers and sisters in Wake County. It could happen to them tomorrow.

I don't mind you having that money allocated for the car given to allowances for the council, but go vote in front of public. Let people know. Be transparent about this information. And I think that's fair.

Cary is still Cary. Cary is still one of the most desirable places to be, live, work, play, run a business. We're a safe community. We're a thriving community. That has not changed. We're a good value for the dollar. We have the second lowest tax rate in Wake County and the highest quality of life. Uh so Cary is still Cary. We will start to move forward and uh this council is committed to doing that.