By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

ALBA, Mo. — The mayor of Alba thinks the town should be able to recoup some portion of almost $80,000 that a former city clerk is accused of embezzling.

Mayor Troy Browning said in a telephone interview Thursday that the town is bonded and should be able to get back some percentage of the theft loss. But the mayor acknowledged that he does not know how much.

“It’s ridiculous,” Browning said of the alleged embezzlement that he first detected in May and resulted in a charge being filed last week against Heather J. Baugh, 32, of rural Reeds. “It’s been making me sick.”

Baugh was fired in May in a closed session of the Alba Board of Aldermen at which Baugh admitted the theft to board members, the mayor said. She had been hired by the board in April 2007 to serve as the Jasper County town’s city clerk.

Browning said he became concerned about city financial records in early May after noticing some discrepancies between monthly ending balances on city accounts and beginning balances of the following months.

He said he went to Southwest Missouri Bank, which carries the city’s accounts, on May 5 and pulled four months’ worth of records. What he found in those records he took to the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department, and an investigation was launched.

The Jasper County prosecutor’s office filed a charge of Class B felony theft against Baugh on June 23, and she turned herself in Monday on the warrant. She is free on $3,500 bond pending an arraignment scheduled for July 15.

The Sheriff’s Department has said Baugh allegedly wrote extra paychecks to herself and misused three city credit cards for personal expenses. The total of the theft was listed at $78,753.53 on a probable-cause affidavit.

The mayor said Thursday that Alba city checks are supposed to require a co-signer. He said that besides the city clerk, either the mayor or the mayor pro tem is supposed to sign each check.

“But when we checked with our bank, we learned that they don’t guarantee that they’re not going to cash checks without two signatures,” Browning said.

Baugh allegedly wrote some checks to herself and cashed them without a co-signer. In other instances, Baugh allegedly had then-Mayor Pro Tem Pansy Schell co-sign blank checks to be filled out later for purported city expenses, and then wrote some of them to herself. The mayor said Schell co-signed unwittingly, trusting that the checks would be made out for legitimate city expenses.

“She (Schell) was just as floored as we all were,” Browning said of the board’s discovery of Baugh’s alleged deception.

Schell could not be reached for comment Thursday.