The Joplin City Council held an informal meeting on February 3, 2025, receiving quarterly updates from the Joplin Sports Authority (JSA), the Human Resources department, and the Planning and Neighborhood Services department. Presentations covered financial audits, economic impact data, personnel turnover, workers' compensation trends, and departmental initiatives. The meeting concluded with no formal votes.
Good evening, where everyone, and welcome to the Jumpham City Council Informal Meeting. Got a couple items on the agenda this evening, and we will get started with the Jumplin Sports Authority quarterly update. Good evening, Mr. Burnaman. Good evening. Thank you for having me. I was told to be pretty brief since there are three things today, so I will do my best to accommodate that. There's basically just a couple things I'm gonna hit on. I'm gonna give a year in review and also I'll just go over the audit, which you guys should have a copy of that as well as we sent some to Leslie and a digital copy, I believe, on Sunday. So I'll skip through uh most of that stuff. So again, I'll go over the audit, final numbers, a synopsis of a few events, and then uh as always, it's important to give shout-outs when it comes to people that we work with and deal with in the community. Um we always want to give credit where credit is due. So as far as the financial audit, if you recall, um this is the I believe it's the seventh year, might be the eighth, um, of the um auditor, which is Ben Miller, he specializes in not for profits. And again, I've worked with Ben before when I was at Missouri Southern there when I was the athletic director and the vice president. So I'm familiar with his work. Yes, it's the seventh year. Um the process again is we give them all the information basically starting around Thanksgiving. Uh he gives us a preliminary report. Uh from there, it goes to our budget and audit committee. Um, and then after that point, the budget audit committee votes on it to approve the audit. He is there for that. From that point, it goes to our full board, and then we also send a copy to Leslie. Uh so that is the process for it. Uh the fundamentally, the answer to the question, which always when you have an audit is are there any findings? And the answer is no, there were no findings. This is uh uh I don't know if it's just we're not that sophisticated of an organization or or what it is, but it is very unusual not to have some sort of findings in an audit. And you know, again, when I was at Southern when Athletics got audited twice, the NCAA audits us, uh the city, I'm not sorry, this the state audits us. Uh it's very unusual for that to happen. So again, we have no long-term uh liabilities. Net position was down by 20,000 compared to previous of 97,000. Again, some of that's related to PPP loans back from COVID issues, uh, and the final comments there, and you can read the executive report as well. Um JSA is in a strong financial health and good job done by JSA Financial Leadership, which is really our board, our budget and audit committee, uh Steve, uh everyone involved in that, uh, as well as the checks and balances in place. Steve is our does our financials, but also there's a backup to that, who's our office manager who double checks the work. And so um it it's a it's good. Whenever you can get a clean bill of health, and there's no issues, that's fantastic. And again, we do share that information with the city and then um with whoever whoever would request such information. So round of applause, thanks. Um, you know, great. So uh the next thing is here um the year in review. So and it took a little while to get this. The star report is a changing mechanism. It's been purchased, so it's a little bit differently, and and there's a lot of a lot of ways that works. So we were waiting on some data to re be recovered for the average daily rates and so forth. So this is a comparison. So the parentheses is the previous year and the first number is this current year. So you can see the number of events this year was 27 versus 31 last year. The room nights generated this year is actually up several thousand, 15,636 compared to 13,898. And so that just goes to show you the significance of what you have. Um the NJCA national championship, 440 athletes in town for eight days, up to eight days. Uh most of them are here for seven.