This business session, held on September 19, 2024, featured two major presentations: the fiscal year 2024 unaudited year-end financial report for the general fund and a human resources hiring update. Council members also approved the minutes from the September 12, 2024 meeting. No public comments were heard.
Fiscal Year 2024 Unaudited Financial Report (General Fund) – Finance Director Tammy Queen and Budget Officer Krista Morrison presented the year-end results. Key points:
Human Resources Hiring Update – HR Director Terry Casey presented data on city employment and the hiring process:
Let's go ahead and get started. Welcome to business session for September 12, 2024. Our first item is approval of minutes for it's not September 12th, September 19th. Our first item is approval of minutes for September 12th, 2024. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. We move to second at all in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. All opposed. Motion passes. We'll start with the fiscal year-in financial report. Get you all moving, start all the fun and go from there. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. Members of the council, and I saw the city manager somewhere. Uh Tammy Queen, Finance Director for the City. I am joined today by Krista Morrison, our budget officer. We are here to provide you the results of the fiscal year 24 unaudited financial statements. So this is our year-end report where we provide you how the year went for us as well as, and we're going we're going to concentrate today on the general fund, but we're also going to provide you a five-year plan so that we can talk about what's ahead for the general fund itself. I know we tried last year to provide kind of a holistic presentation that included all funds, and that was a lot. And so we thought maybe it might make more sense in talking with the chair to make sure that we kind of separated this out for you so we have time to concentrate on the various parts of uh the city's funding. So with that, we will jump right on in. The city keeps track of things in funds. We use fund accounting like all local governments, and we put our revenues and expenditures into particular buckets, if you will, in two major classifications. That would be the governmental type activities as well as the business type activities. I'll start with the business type. It's maybe a little bit easier to understand. When we talk about business type activities, we're talking about things that are user fee supported and or they operate a little bit more like a business, like our airport, water sewer, and stormwater enterprises. And those folks, they generate their own revenue, uh, they pay their own expenses and really kind of operate like little businesses in and of in and of themselves. Everything else that doesn't fit into that category goes into the governmental activities bucket. And we have various fund types that are included there where we keep track of various taxes, grants, and fees, as well as the uh expenditures of the governmental side of uh the city. So we do that through various funds. The general fund is the one we hear about the most, uh, that we talk about the most. We also keep track of things in special revenue funds where maybe there's a limit by ballot, by uh some kind of statute or ordinance that we can only do certain things with the funding. And so we keep track of those in individual funds so that we can keep those buckets separate and not uh mix them up and use them for a purpose that was not intended by voters or by state statute. We also do capital improvement funds as well as debt funds, and we're gonna talk in the coming weeks uh with about each of these, either here if you so choose or within the confines of finance uh committee additional business. So as we talk about kind of an overarching theme for the year, uh generally what you'll see is fund balances have continued to improve, and uh that's because revenues have come in higher than anticipated and expenditures are lower than anticipated. We'll talk in more detail about all of that, but across the board fund balances are generally better. Keep in mind, and we talked about this the last time uh about a year ago when we talked about this same topic, that having fund balances in some of these funds is a it's it's a relatively new phenomenon. If we went back in history, we would find that many of these funds were previously supported by the general fund, not necessarily standalone, let alone able to um generate their own uh fund balance and keep that balance. So we have that as the backdrop, but it's important to note our structural imbalance still persists as we look at our five-year planning uh horizon, and Krista will talk about that in just a second. And uh we as we look ahead, we've got the impact of a new labor agreement that was just approved, as well as uh the backdrop of kind of priority-based budgeting and how that's going to work and improve the way that we look uh ahead at priorities that you want to fund, that stakeholders want to fund, and that departments think are as important are important. Watch for an update on priority-based budgeting on October 29th uh in the finance committee. So you have in front of you a monthly financial report. It's the little bound book here. You get one of these via email once a month. So we send you the year-to-date results every single month. This one is the year-end version, and it has a couple of unique characteristics that prior versions and the monthly versions don't necessarily have. One is I'll direct your attention to appendix A, which looks like this.