In a tense meeting of the Board of Selectmen Tuesday, members voted in favor of all year-end transfers of money between municipal accounts, despite many of the transfers being tabled by the Finance Committee last week.

At last Wednesday’s Finance Committee meeting, Town Administrator Mark Andrews requested several year-end transfers of money between municipal accounts. Fiscal year 2011 ended on June 30, and as is the case with all budgets, it is normal for some accounts to contain surpluses and others to have deficits at the end of the year. Town officials review the numbers and request FinCom approval for the transfer of funds between accounts to reduce deficits and pay bills.

Last week, the FinCom questioned Andrews' request to fill year-end deficits by using emergency funding earmarked to pay audit expenses related to a $919,000 discrepancy in the town's books.

The Board of Selectmen voted in favor of all the transfers the Finance Committee approved last week and, with additional information in-hand, voted 3-2 in favor of all the transfers tabled by the FinCom. The Finance Committee will resume the discussion and vote on the remaining year-end transfers at its Wednesday evening meeting.

Selectmen Steve Holmes and Cara Winslow were the opposing votes on Tuesday.

“The FinCom is here to advise us and we are voting [favorably] on all of these anyway,” Winslow argued. “[The FinCom] is supposed to be the board that watches out for every single cent of that budget.”

After the $919,000 discrepancy was found in April, the Finance Committee approved the use of $40,000 from funds in its reserve account - used for unforeseen expenses and emergency situations - to pay for an anticipated increase in the cost of an audit of the town's books.

Andrews said "there were sufficient funds" for the audit and asked the FinCom to use the money instead for deficits in the salary accounts of the Council on Aging and Town Planner departments.

The committee voted to table until July 13 the transfer of $28,000 of the audit funding to the Town Planner's salary budget. This would cover a discrepancy created after an article at the 2010 fall Town Meeting reduced the Planning Department's salary and wages account by $33,000.

The committee also voted to table the discussion on Andrews’ request to transfer $34,000 to from three areas - The Harbormaster Department salaries account, the emergency audit funding, and the Harbormaster Department expenses account - to pay for parts of both Green and Griswold's salaries.

The FinCom approved transfers of funding from various accounts to pay for routine expenses, such as unanticipated postage costs caused by the number of questions on the April 2010 ballot, contractual obligations to the town administrator, and a higher than anticipated cost for town cell phones (which is built in to the budget for the new fiscal year).

Check WarehamVillageSoup.com for coverage of the Wednesday's Finance Committee meeting.