PHENIX CITY, Ala. — City Manager Wallace Hunter inadvertently called the city’s own financial data “false information” while attempting to downplay recent reporting that exposed a decade-long financial decline for the city.

The financial information he was referring to came directly from the city’s website itself.

In a recent article published by the Muckraker, nearly a decade’s worth of the city’s own data revealed that Phenix City accrued an adjusted deficit of roughly $23 million from 2013 to 2020, losing twenty-six cents worth of adjusted value from every dollar it had during the time period.

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During the city council meeting held on September 20, 2022, Hunter said that certain “websites” are sharing so-called “false information” about the city’s finances,  saying residents should get their information from the city clerk’s office instead — which is ironic, since that is exactly where the Muckraker obtained the financial data we published in our previous article.

By labeling the Muckraker’s reporting as so-called “false information,” Hunter was ironically placing that label on the city’s own published financial data. In doing so, Hunter appears to have exposed himself as attempting to mislead the public, seeking to cover-up the exposure of what the city’s own data reveals. 

We’ll walk you through how we obtained the city’s public financial information so you can see Mr. Hunter’s “false information” for yourself:

First, we went to www.phenixcityal.us and viewed the transparency portal:

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Next, we viewed the box labeled “Annual Financial Reports” in the middle of the page:

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We then opened the “2020 Annual Financial Report” and scrolled to the “Statement of Net Position” page within the report:

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Within the “Statement of Net Position” page, we found where the “Total” column intercepted the row labeled “Total net position” towards the bottom of the page:

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We wrote that number down, and then repeated the process for all years from 2020 all the way back to 2013.

The raw values alone revealed the city lost roughly $12.4 million from 2013 to 2020. However, that does not reveal the true value of the loss — not even close. We have to adjust for inflation to see the real value of how the city’s net position changed over time.

When calculating the real value of something in dollars over time, you have to normalize the data so they all are represented in the same year’s dollar-value. This is called “adjusting for inflation,” which is a normal occurrence; a dollar in 1922 is worth more than a dollar in 2022. 

We then converted the city’s reported net positions by-year to “2022 dollars.” We did this using a tool provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. We wrote down the adjusted values in a table next to the city’s net positions, including the appropriate inflation rates provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Those adjusted net position values were then charted, visually revealing the true value of the city’s loss — an adjusted deficit of $23 million, which was a 26% decline. We then published our findings in a transparent manner, including all data sources and appropriate citations.

Unless the city’s own financial data is falsely published, we reported exactly what the city’s own data shows. Clearly, that was inconvenient enough for Wallace Hunter to try to silence and discredit our reporting.

We’ll leave it to you as the reader to determine what motivations Mr. Wallace Hunter, Mayor Lowe, and other council members  may have in attempting to discredit our reporting of the city’s own financial data, but the numbers came from the exact place Wallace Hunter just told everyone to get them from — the city itself.

“False Information” seems to be a poor way to say “we don’t like what you publish,” but hiding the truth behind the Wizard’s green curtain isn’t going to help Dorothy solve problems in the City of Oz.

Facts are stubborn things — so we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.