Villarma brings skills to job of borough finance director

Mason Villarma is good at math.

"It's therapeutic, in a way. It always works out," Villarma, the borough's new finance director, said.

The Gonzaga 2020 grad has plans to work out the borough's books after filling the position - which was vacant for about eight months - in September.

After he snagged an internship with Big Four tax audit firm KPMG in Spokane, Washington, last year, the firm hired Villarma to work in Seattle.

Then the pandemic struck right in the heart of his employment. Like so many others, he was relegated to working from home. That included a lot of remote calls and assisting clients online.

Villarma wasn't looking to leave KPMG, but heard from family members and family friend Jeff Jabusch ("my dad used to say he was such a stellar point guard") that there was a finance director position open in Wrangell.

"My accounting experience, and my goals being directed more toward finance - I thought this could be a really great fit," he said.

Villarma said working for KPMG gave him a solid foundation with a lot of skills, but the position in Wrangell offered the holistic experience he wanted, and a return to his roots. Villarma's grandparents - who are in their 90s, and have been married for nearly seven decades - live here.

And Villarma, who grew up in Washington state, has 13 years of fond memories of coming to Wrangell and working on fishing boats with his dad, Jeff Villarma, and other residents like Frank Warfel and John Agostine.

In fact, the experience Villarma gleaned on fishing vessels informed how he approaches his career.

"It teaches you about teams and culture, and working with people that don't always have the same background or values," Villarma said. "You really learn to work with all sorts of people."

A panel of seven staff members, among them Borough Manager Lisa Von Bargen, interviewed Villarma in late May and offered him the position the following week. He said he wanted to finish up his commitments to KPMG in a respectful way, so his first day at the borough was Sept. 7.

One of his first assignments is wrapping up an audit for fiscal year 2020 that has stretched on for 15 months.

"An audit is like a litmus test," Villarma told the borough assembly at its Sept. 28 meeting. "If an audit stresses the system, it's a failed system, from an accounting structure standpoint."

One issue is that over the years the borough has created too many different fund accounts, he said. "The analogy is like a hoarder in a house."

Villarma estimates Wrangell's total amount of cash and investments at $35.4 million. That includes general government funds, reserves and self-supporting enterprise funds, such as the electrical department, port and harbors.

But he said those funds are bogged down amid a complicated accounting system that inhibits the borough from producing meaningful financial information. Each transaction varies, and different software is employed at each department, Villarma said.

Just one small example is the receipt process at the landfill: Information on paper slips has to be brought to the borough and manually entered into the system.

Higher up on the priority list, "every revenue and expense is manually coded at City Hall on the department's behalf using a 19-digit GL (general ledger) code, which is absurd," he said. "We need to streamline how we process transactions at the department level and revitalize our accounting structure and reporting system to be more simple and effective in informing users."

He made those observations from walk-throughs he conducted with each department, from the port to the library.

Villarma also has consulted with finance directors Jody Tow in Petersburg and Jeff Rogers in Juneau.

"It was great having Mason here in Juneau to see how our Finance Department works," Rogers said in an email. "He's clearly intelligent, ambitious, and has great love for Wrangell. We sent him home with a pile of notes."

Tow has been the finance director in Petersburg for 15 years. Villarma shadowed her for a couple of days, walked through with her staff and other departments, learned how the finance department is organized, and what software and programs they use, Tow said.

And it's a bit of a full circle moment.

"When I started, Jeff Jabusch was my mentor," Tow said. "That was pretty neat."

Villarma said he is eager and optimistic. "We have all the tools here to succeed as a community," Villarma said. "I'm concerned with creating revenue streams in the future and attracting industry to this town. Without those two things, we can't grow."