The city of Durango’s new finance director is ready to take on the financial systems that allowed 11 years of embezzlement by the former finance director to go unchecked.

Cynthia Sneed of Arizona, who starts Monday, has more than 20 years of experience in financial management and accounting, working in other municipalities, the private sector and higher education. She joins the city on the heels of a criminal investigation into the former finance director, Julie Brown, who pleaded guilty earlier this month to stealing $710,000 from the city over more than a decade.

“My approach is going to be transparency,” Sneed said. “I’m going to be aboveboard with everything with lots of communication.”

Sneed was the associate controller in the finance department at the Maricopa County Community College District in Arizona starting in 2012. Before that, she worked for one year as a financial consultant for municipalities with Heinfeld, Meech and Co. in Phoenix.

She is a certified public accountant and a certified municipal finance officer with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s degree in educational leadership.

“We’ve got a proven professional with a lot of experience and all the qualifications and education for this position,” said City Manager José Madrigal. “That’s how we know we got it right.”

One top priority for Sneed, and Madrigal, is strengthening the city’s internal controls, the financial checks-and-balances partially designed to catch fraud. Brown was able to manipulate those systems over the years to misappropriate city funds.

“I have done that (internal control work) in the past. I’m very comfortable with that,” Sneed said.

When she was finance director for the city of Maricopa, a suburb of Phoenix, it was during the Great Recession, housing crisis and Maricopa’s first decade as a city. She helped build and upgrade the city’s financial procedures.

“We steered that ship through the financial storm and kept them in a good place financially so the recovery was a lot easier for them,” Sneed said.

While working with Maricopa, Sneed also helped bring to light fraud by a city employee, according to inMaricopa.com.

In Durango, she will start by meeting with Madrigal, department directors and “as many people as possible” to be brought up to speed on city finances, she said. She plans to be upfront about past misappropriation issues and ask for input about any concerns.

She will also dive into assessing and strengthening internal financial procedures so they match national best practices for accounting.

“I’m sure some things are working fine,” Sneed said. “Clearly, other things were not working fine. We just need to identify those and make adjustments.”

The finance department has been understaffed for months. In addition to its regular tasks and reworking internal controls, it will be tackling annual audits and the financial impacts of the ongoing pandemic.

“Filling this position, plus some restructuring in the budget to bring more people over, has helped us get to the point where we believe we should be fully staffed and good to go,” Madrigal said.

Sneed’s salary is $160,000, about $20,000 higher than the former director’s salary.

While it might raise some eyebrows, it’s appropriate for her experience level, Madrigal said. He intends to balance the increase by having Sneed, a CPA, prepare the city’s annual audit for review. Outsourcing that work has cost the city $120,000 annually, he said.

The Sneed family planned to spend the long Thanksgiving weekend house hunting in Durango. Her son, who is in high school, might come in January, while her husband, a teacher, will join at the end of the school year. They are looking forward to the outdoors activities in the area, Sneed said.

“That quality of life is very important to us and very exciting,” she said.

smullane@durangoherald.com