Special Report: Marion City Council (Feb 23, 2026) — A Collision of Crisis and Dismissing the False NarrativesReading Mode

The Marion City Council meeting on February 23, 2026, served as a public post-mortem for a fiscal crisis decades in the making. While the official agenda focused on Ordinance 2026-18—a proposal to repeal municipal income tax credits—the underlying tension revealed a deep-seated rot in city governance. 

Consistent with long-term investigative reporting from MarionWatch.com, the city’s current “fiscal caution” status and nearly $9 million deficit are the culmination of over 20 years of systemic lack of financial oversight, IT control failures, that spiraled out of control around 2009, with a deliberate breakdown in transparency by the former Schertzer Administration.

It Wasn’t a “Glitch”: Why Marion’s Deficit Requires a Digital Autopsy

​ANALYSIS: The City Admits “New World” is Broken—But New Software Alone Won’t Fix the $9 Million Mystery Without a Close Look! ​On December 8, 2025, Mayor Bill Collins confirmed t…

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The Veritas Forensic Failure: Restricted and Sabotaged

The current $9 million deficit is the mathematical consequence of what IT and financial consultants identified as a breakdown in institutional integrity and governance. As detailed in the Marion Watch series “Silent Sabotage” the investigation by the firm Veritas was fundamentally hampered from its inception:

• “Tied Hands” Protocol: Veritas was explicitly prohibited from auditing records pre-2020. This forced the firm to accept “beginning balances” as fact, despite evidence of unexplained journal entries dating back many years.

• Data Corruption: The reporting in “IT Control Failures and the New World Transition” highlights that the city’s ERP software was plagued by “ghost entries” and “unmapped accounts.” Veritas cited serious reconciliation issues where manual overrides were used to “plug” balances to match bank records.

• The Veritas Rejection: During Monday’s meeting, it was said that the city spent $275,000 on Veritas to fix the books, only for the recommendations to be ignored. Councilman Rollins explicitly noted that these professional standards were provided years ago but never implemented. However, the records show a different and much more complex reality, a reality that Mr. Rollins was at least partially a witness to. 
  
• Veritas Quit: According to Marion officials, Veritas ultimately quit becuase they could not rectify the issues, and or were not provided access to do so.

Obvious to the Experts Hidden From You: How an IT Observer Could See Marion’s “Silent Sabotage” Years Before the City Admitted It

A Marion Watch “External Observer Forensic IT Investigation” The Anatomy of a Predicted Collapse (2009–2025) To the public, Marion’s financial chaos from 2009 to 2021 looked like human error blamed…

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The Central Conflict: Revenue vs. Accountability

The debate highlighted the tension between an administration trying to stabilize the budget and a public demanding historical accountability, but not understanding how it happened and where it began.

• The Administration’s Stance: Mayor Collins and Councilman Barr framed the tax repeal as a necessary component of a state-mandated recovery plan. Collins cited the $8.9 million negative balance and pressure from the state to increase revenue to avoid “fiscal watch.”

• The Opposition’s Stance: Councilman Rollins and residents argued that the city has a “spending and accountability problem,” not a revenue problem. They emphasized that the city should collect the $1 million in outstanding debts before “tapping into the working people”. 

Mairon Watch agrees that there was an accountability problem, it is deeply seeded and predates the current Collins Administration. The Collins administration has been brave to recognize the rot, and put their foot down and deal with it before it becomes and inescapable black hole.

We also agree that there was a rampant spending problem, and while a small majority of spending was from the Collins Administration,and were obviously done before they were aware of the gravity of the issues Marion Watch has been working with the administration on, records previously released by us which are official public records, show that the spending problems are also historic. 

When you put this together with the information technology control issues, it makes for an explosive mixture, and the current state of affairs in Marion are the predictable outcome. 

The Override That Broke Marion? How a Hidden Software Loophole Fueled 16 Years of Fiscal Chaos & Contributed to the SIlent Sabotage

For more than a decade, Marion’s financial system operated with a silent flaw—a General Ledger (GL) override buried inside its accounting software. Installed in July 2009, this override allowed cit…

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Exchanges With Officials

The meeting featured pointed exchanges regarding the legacy of “silent sabotage” in Marion’s financial offices.

• The Auditor’s Office: Public discussion focused on the failure to reconcile books since 2020. Rollins stated, “the problem was the sitting auditor did not take the recommendations… it’s pretty obvious that they don’t want to do it.” However, official documents show that Veritas also identified multiple issues with reconciliation predating 2020. 

• Councilman Rollins: Witness or Participant? While Rollins presented himself as a whistleblower, his history suggests he was a primary witness to this decline. As noted in “The Watchman Report” broadcasts, and other publications by Marion Watch, Rollins was briefed on unauthorized physical access to the Auditor’s office and IT security breaches years ago. His current opposition to the tax increase relies on a “spending” narrative that he presided over for years.

• The Treasurer: Residens challenged the current Treasurer’s “radio” comments regarding “waste, fraud, and abuse,” arguing that if abuse was identified, it should be cut first.

Again, Marion Watch has reported extensively on this situation, and the waste fraud and abuse mentioned by Ms. Laing will need to be identified and confirmed by a forensic IT audit firm due to the massive flaws and misconfigurations of the New World System and IT governance predating the Collins Administration.

These issues with the financial IT systems and financial systems overall,  have all the digital hallmarks of fraud, waste, and abuse. 

Former Auditor Landon Claims Vindication as Audits Confirm Financial Flaws

Former Marion City Auditor Robert Landon has issued a press release claiming that recent audit findings and reviews by outside firms have “definitively verified” the systemic financial …

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Key Legislative Actions

Despite the heated atmosphere, the Council moved forward on several fiscal items:

Robert Landon Breaks the Silence

Robert Landon III breaks his silence on Auditor issues, personal struggles, transparency, ethics, accountability.

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Conclusion: A Legacy of “Silent Sabotage”

The meeting underscored that Marion’s crisis is not a simple math error; it is the result of 20 years of “silent sabotage”—the persistent neglect of fiscal duties and resistance to modernizing IT systems. While the current Council grapples with the fallout, the public remains focused on the governance failures that allowed the city’s controls to erode.

The key is understanding where it began, which sadly, some will simply not admit to it no matter how much evidence is laid out on the table. In fact, some simply refuse to look closer to see the truth.