AUBURN – Tracy Roy, the interim finance director in South Portland, has been hired as the new Auburn finance director.

While Auburn has lacked a permanent finance director since July, the city has not lost its focus on the topic.

According to City Manager Glenn Aho, Roy will conduct Finance 101 classes for each of the city’s department heads in a move to create more financial accountability.

Roy, who said she is excited about her new job that starts March 2, hopes to help department heads monitor finances on a daily basis.

One of her first tasks will be to create what Aho described as an “executive coaching program” for the city’s division managers. Too few division managers know about finance in the public sector, Aho said. These are the people who are in charge of managing millions of dollars, and this dichotomy is a “major crippling effort for all public efforts.”

“My aim is to have division managers excel in their own profession, but have enough financial background and training so they can feed the numbers to the finance director so we can make proper policy,” Aho said. Only then can the city identify waste and increase efficiencies.

Roy, who has a degree in business accounting from the University of Maine at Augusta, has been the interim finance director in South Portland since November, supervising 16 employees. Before that, she was comptroller for South Portland and, from July 2001 to April 2003, she was an accountant with that city.

Roy worked in the private sector from 1999 to 2001 as a staff accountant for ENVISIONet Computer Services in Brunswick. She lives in Lisbon.

“Tracy brings an understanding of public-sector finances with a keen analytical mind poised to assist city departments to discover the true cost of services and implement changes needed to improve the city’s efficiency and effectiveness,” Aho said.

Roy will continue the recent work in Auburn to examine the exact cost of precise municipal services. For instance, Aho said, the city has recently priced out snowstorms. In the past, Public Works employees would define storms in terms of quantity of snow moved and sand used. Now, they measure work by cost per mile.

The shift to pricing service delivery has saved about $8,000 in salt so far this winter, Aho said. By costing out specific services, Public Works crews are more aware of cost containment.

Another area the city is costing out is the frequency of inspections. If inspectors make two or three trips to one site and if each inspection costs the city $70, “we’re tripling the cost of our services, perhaps because we’re not being thorough enough the first time,” Aho said.

He said such inefficiency was the result of fear. “People are afraid of risk, but everything we do is a risk. My experience has been that public employees try to minimize risk to zero.” And that’s expensive.

This fear of risk has resulted in over-regulation in government and “we have become regulators instead of helpers, because we don’t want to make a mistake.”