During their monthly meeting Thursday, the Blytheville City Council’s Finance and Purchasing Committee amended three budgets to account for the need for an increase in expenditures.
The first was to increase the budget for the Ritz to complete its heating and air conditioning project. The second increase was for the municipal court in order to cover the salary for the judge. The third budget increase was for the Parks and Recreation Department to replace a broken window at the Delta Gateway Museum, which will cost $8,410.
Finance Director John Callens first addressed the Delta Gateway Museum request.
“It’s about $8,400, which here again, was not budgeted for but we have a fund called the “2001 B Fund.” It was created back, I guess, when they were working on the Kress Building. There’s approximately $20,000 in that [fund],” Callens explained. “The budget would have to be adjusted. But the surplus would come out of the 2001 Bond fund.”
Hartsfield motioned to approve to send this to the Council and Musgraves seconded. However, Parks opted to bundle the three approvals.
“The second one is amending the municipal court salary by $20,000, which will come out of the general fund surplus, to pay for the judge’s salary,” Callens explained. “The third one would be to amend The Ritz budget by $40,200, which has already been approved. It was approved last year and it never got completed.”
Hartsfield advised that in the future, because they are dealing with three budgets from different departments and different funds, to avoid bundling amending budgets. He was worried that constituents would question the sources of funds. The committee concurred and they approved to send the amendments to the city council with Hartsfield making a motion on all three and Musgraves seconding all three.
Lastly, the committee heard from Keith Prevost, the controller from Nucor-Yamato Steel, about the renewal of bonds. Prevost also wanted to haggle with the committee to decrease the amount they must pay for the administration fee. Prevost said that the fees are in the range from five to twenty thousand dollars. Hartsfield proposed $10,000 for the payment of administration fees. The committee approved this amount.
After calling the meeting to order Callens gave a report of the tax revenue for the month of March.
As compared to last year the city’s tax was up about $2,800.
The overall tax revenue for the first three months, compared to last year, was up $44,000.
For the county, the amount of tax that was collected as compared to March of 2016 was down about $7,500. The year-to-date amount for the county tax collection was down about $30,000.
According to Callens, in terms of the revenue for the general fund, it has remained relatively stable with a $19,000 difference in what was collected in 2016 versus this year. Callens said that the expenditures from the general fund were slightly up due to one-time purchases that were made.
“The expenses that we realize in general, as you can see, they are up slightly. But it has nothing to do with operating expenses,” Callens said. “But that’s easily explainable. If you look at just sanitation, in 2017 we spent $172,000 on equipment purchases. So, one-time equipment purchases. That’s more than the increase. In reality if you look at operating expenses we’re down for the first three months as compared to last year.”
Callens then provided the committee with a budget analysis for expenditures for each of the city’s departments. He explained that by March each department should have already spent somewhere near 25 percent of their budget for the year. But there were several departments which had already went over the expected 25 percent.
“So I dug a little bit deeper... Animal Control was slightly over, at [29.37 percent]. That is [because] they have an additional employee that is working a little more than what they had planned.”
Councilwoman Barbara Brothers asked if the committee had voted to consider the employee to be full-time. However, Hartsfield said that had changed. Callens said that even though this person has been working more than part-time, the money is just not available and not in budget for animal control.
Callens continued to go over the departments that were over the expected budget.
“The other one [is general administration, over at 34.24 percent] but again, general admin pays a lot of our one-time expenses at the beginning of the year… The other, as you can see, that’s slightly over at 27.7 percent is the Municipal Court. We have already discussed this,” Callens said. “When they were doing the budget, [the municipal court] forgot to put the judge’s salary on there because she is paid separately.”
Sanitation was over at 31.71 percent due to the need to replace equipment. Thunder Bayou Golf Links has spent 28.73 percent of its budget. Callens reminded the committee that technically the golf course is not over since they were only budgeted for eight months.
“The other one is The Ritz. It looks like they are way over budget [at 69.85 percent], the reason being that the council approved to replace their heating and air unit toward the end of the year last year,” said Callens.
However, that project was not completed and had rolled over into this year’s budget. Callens explained that the money is available and does not actually effect the budget for the 2017 year.