You Ask. We Answer: Huntsville Clerk Treasurer Ken Benion

Clerk Treasurer might not seem like the most exciting job, but Ken Benion oversees many of the City of Huntsville’s most important functions.

A Birmingham native, Benion has been with Huntsville for 12 years. He had more than 30 years of prior accounting experience and is a Certified Public Accountant.

“My career started in corporate America after graduating college and moved into government working with Jefferson County,” he said.

In Jefferson County, Benion worked with both the cities of Birmingham and Fairfield. He became Huntsville’s Clerk Treasurer in 2016.

Benion recently took time to answer a few questions about his role with the City.

Many residents are likely unaware of the many duties of your office. Can you provide an overview of your day-to-day responsibilities? 

The main duties of the Clerk Treasurer include issuing business licenses and depositing or tracking all funds received by the City. Revenue from licenses contribute about 6% to the City’s overall budget or a little over $21 million.

We maintain records, including minutes of meetings, ordinances, resolutions and contracts. We also prepare the agenda for City Council meetings. Municipal elections are major part of the job as well.

Why is keeping City Council meeting records important?

Some records are considered permanent by the State of Alabama such as ordinances, resolutions and minutes. Other records can be destroyed after a designated amount of time.

We are putting in place a system to track these records and destroy them in order to limit the amount of space required for storage. It is important to keep records and have them accessible for reference for various uses such as legal proceedings.

What’s the best thing about being Clerk Treasurer?

You get to work with all the different departments, and you get an overview of how it all fits together.

The Clerk Treasurer’s office is also responsible for delivering mail to City departments and agencies. Would you say your office is more or less reliable than the U.S. Postal Service?

I would say our delivery is much more efficient than the post office of recent months. Most of the complaints we receive come from mail not delivered to us or the timeliness of mail coming from the postal service.

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Benion also answered a question submitted via social media, which can be seen below: