Dawn Vogelsberg: We Just Saved a Bunch of Money ...

City Council meetings can be pretty exciting (insert smiley face emoticon here), but usually the business of the city is conducted swiftly and efficiently, leading to some important occurrences going seemingly unnoticed.

Case in point: We recently learned that the city will be by refinancing electric bonds (similar to refinancing a mortgage with many more requirements such as holding public hearings and publishing notices in newspapers and the like.

Finance Director Tom Dahl sent the council a memo stating that bond market conditions were favorable to re-fund Electric Revenue Bonds. As a result of the re-funding, staff had calculated that the city would over the life of the bonds or 4 percent, which is above the city’s target of 3 percent.

This re-funding would not include any new debt or extend the length of the bond payments. The final sale determined that the savings actually turned out to be approximately $1million!

Now, this is not the result of just a well-timed refinance. This is the result of planning and executing a balanced budget, mindful of things that matter to financial institutions such as fund balances, etc. Many of these decisions are policy decisions made by the council. Others are decisions that are debated and decided on the fly as opportunities present themselves. All of them are with the guidance of the city staff’s recommendations.

So before you think that the staff recommends what would be good for them, please think again. Staff members do their jobs by recommending what is good for the city. Sounds like an opinion from someone that respects them. In fact, yes, that is true, but really, who cares what I think about the ability of staff to make financial recommendations to us? What you could or should care about is what The Government Finance Officers Association of the United States and Canada (GFOA) thinks.

GFOA presented a to the city of Geneva for its annual budget for the fiscal year beginning May 1, 2010. In order to receive this award, a governmental unit must publish a budget document that meets program criteria as a policy document, as an operations guide, as a financial plan, and as a communications device.

And if that isn’t enough, let’s refer back to the beginning of the article. The city saved $1 million by re-funding electric bonds. The primary reasons that the city was able to do this is because our staff watches expenditures closely on a daily basis, has recommended cutting the budget by more than 30 percent over the past three years, and has shored up the city’s General Fund reserves in accordance with sound government accounting standards.

These financial policies and practices resulted in Moody’s Financial Services awarding the , which in turn allowed the city to receive a 2.239 percent rate in the bond issue refunding and that saved the taxpayers $1 million.

So move over you cockney-talking reptile ... because we just saved a bunch of money, and we don’t even have a mascot!