City council approved this week a plan to decrease bureaucratic hold-ups for critical repair work while increasing transparency on budgets for capital projects.--NEWS FILE PHOTO
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City council has approved a new plan to not only speed up repair work on”critical components” of the city’s electric generating plant, but also for increased general reporting requirements when project budgets change.
Now, all in-year changes to balance out budget overages and underages will be brought to the audit committee alongside thrice-annual financial statements in April, May and October.
The measure was added to a “budget amendment policy” update that was presented Monday at council’s regular meeting.
Discussed last fall as a way for senior administrators to OK major spending changes when turbines and other specific equipment was at repair facilities, the discussion on Monday turned to reporting requirements on all city accounting changes.
Mayor Linnsie Clark said she would be more comfortable with a requirement more frequent reporting while finance officials, saying that adding reports to the tri-annual financial statements would not be burdensome.
For decades, the city manager has had the authority to shift money between budget items, cancelling some projects or adding money from underspent work to see projects through to completion without bringing minor amendments back to council each time.
A summery of changes is published annually alongside the city’s year-end financial statements and have routinely shown that, overall, the net from over, under and cancelled projects has kept money in the city’s hands.
Only new projects, major changes in scope, major increases, or changes in funding sources, such as acquiring new grant funding, would require council approval, administrators said.
Coun. Robert Dumanowski said it is “inevitable” that budgets change throughout the year in large businesses and organizations.
He hoped the mid-term reporting wouldn’t cause interim confusion for a topic that already can be hard to understand.
Coun. Darren Hirsch agreed.
“It all makes sense at the end as opposed to in the middle,” said Hirsch, the audit committee chair. “I hope people allow some grace for that.”
When discussed at committee meetings in December, administrators stated that any power plant work changes would be presented to the energy committee at its next meeting.
That issue arose in the summer when administrators told council they approved an additional $4 million on work to refurbish a LM-6000 gas-fired power generating unit while it was on the shop floor, and couldn’t wait two weeks for council to convene and approve a budget amendment.
