Photo by Jon Anderson
Jennifer Cornett, the city of Hoover's chief financial officer, is leaving to become the assistant city manager and finance director for Mountain Brook, Alabama.
The city of Mountain Brook is hiring Hoover’s chief financial officer, Jennifer Cornett, as Mountain Brook’s new assistant city manager and finance director.
Cornett, who has been Hoover’s CFO for a year and eight months, said she will be taking the place of Steve Boone, who has been Mountain Brook’s assistant city manager and finance director for 29 years and is moving up to become the city manager in December.
Her last day with the city of Hoover will be Oct. 1, she said.
Cornett, who is a resident of Mountain Brook, came on board with Hoover in the last few days of 2023. She inherited a Finance Department with a multitude of problems, including unbalanced transactions, unreconciled accounts, delayed financial reports, IRS penalties and missing financial records, according to a review done by an outside financial investigative firm called Kroll.
Cornett said that, when she was hired, she knew there were shortcomings in the department and some tension because of the way her predecessor left, but she didn’t know the degree of the problems or the degree of the broken relationships and broken trust between the city’s elected officials.
Once she got in place and began to realize the scope of the problems, she was the one who recommended Kroll be hired to make sure there was no fraud, she said. Kroll found no evidence of fraud, malfeasance or asset misappropriation but documented the other problems.
Cornett said that, now, every single problem referenced in the Kroll report has been addressed and rectified, and she feels the city is in a good position to turn over the finances to someone else’s control.
Accounts have been reconciled, issues with the IRS have been worked out, financial policies have been firmed up in writing, additional finance staff has been hired and the staff members have been undergoing training, Cornett said.
“There’s a lot of great people who work at the city,” she said. “These are folks that need training; they need help; they need reinforcements; they need encouragement.”
This election season has been hard for city employees, especially the finance staff, because they’ve been drug through the mud over and over, Cornett said.
“They worked their butts off to try to help fix things, and they were successful at fixing those things,” she said. “You don’t feel like there’s public appreciation for it. They feel beaten up. That’s hard.”
There’s always room for improvement and finding smarter ways to do things, but the city’s financial house is back in order, she said.
For her, the move to Mountain Brook is a good opportunity, she said, because it allows her a chance to serve in the city where she lives and gives her an opportunity to work with and learn from Boone, whom she said is “one of the best of the best.”
Plus, there’s a lot of stability in the leadership in Mountain Brook, and this also gives her a chance to stretch her management skills as an assistant city manager, she said.
“It’s kind of like a perfect situation if there is one,” Cornett said. “I am really excited about this opportunity. … It’s an opportunity for me to really grow.”
Before going to Hoover, Cornett spent 10 years as a full-time lecturer for the Auburn University School of Accountancy. She also served eight years before that as a part-time recruiting and student activities coordinator and a year as a part-time instructor.
Cornett spent two years as a staff accountant at the Barfield, Murphy, Shank & Smith accounting firm and 12 years in commercial lending for ITT Commercial Finance, Deutsche Bank and Green Tree Financial, according to her LinkedIn page.
Cornett has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Kennesaw State University and a master’s degree in accounting from the University of Alabama.
While the Hoover job has been more challenging than she expected it to be, she sees a lot of positives in the story, she said.
“When you walk into a hard situation, your rate of learning and figuring things out gets compressed into a shorter period of time,” Cornett said.
She first talked with Mayor Frank Brocato about the possibility of leaving Hoover back when he was still trying to decide if he wanted to run for re-election because Mountain Brook already was setting things up for Boone to be promoted, she said.
The job offer to her didn’t officially come until the day after the election, Aug. 27, and she accepted it then, she said. She talked to Hoover’s mayor-elect — police Chief Nick Derzis — about her departure the same day, she said.
“I’m really just interested in making sure I have a clean handoff so the city’s in good hands when I leave and the positive trends in the office can continue because we’ve made a lot of progress in the last two years,” Cornett said.
The department is now set up to run well, which should free up whomever is hired to be chief financial officer to work on strategy more than spending so much time problem-solving, she said.
“I really think things are to a place where somebody can walk in — somebody with the right skills and personality — and lead this group,” Cornett said. “The group is good. The group is solid. I’m sad to leave them.”
She believes Derzis has some strong leadership qualities, but leaders are only as good as the people with whom they surround themselves, she said.
“Hopefully, he will surround himself with good people that are going to lead the city forward,” she said. “I think he will.”
However, there still needs to be some healing to heal rifts between the city’s elected officials, city employees and the public, Cornett said.
“Some of the behaviors we’ve been seeing in meetings — it’s just kind of embarrassing,” she said. “I was embarrassed, and I wasn’t even doing it. I’m hoping there are rosier days ahead for the city.”
Derzis and some current and incoming City Council members have been calling for a state audit of Hoover’s finances, but Cornett said she thinks it’s unnecessary.
“I don’t understand the call for that,” she said. “I thought that was just political showboating. I’ve never heard of a city asking the state to come in and look at the books unless they’ve found something like Homewood did and self-reported.”
A state audit will cost the city money and take a really long time and likely delay the city’s regular audit, she said.
“I think it would be a terrible idea to have the state come in, but that’s going to be a decision for the governing body to make,” she said.
