Auditor says Smithville in Sound Financial Condition

The City of Smithville is in sound financial condition according to city auditor John Poole, CPA.
Poole gave a report to the Board of Mayor and Aldermen Monday night on findings of the audit for the 2006-2007 fiscal year, which ended June 30th, and gave an historical perspective of the city’s financial condition. “Going back to the 1990 audit report, in the utility fund, we had about $4.4 million in cash. However, at that time we had debt of $4.2 million, so there was really only what we would call a cushion of about $200,000. Looking at the utility system today, we’ve got in cash in certificates of deposit almost $3.4 million. There’s only $860,000 in debt, so there is a cushion, a reserve of $2.5 million. That means as this city continues to grow and needs to make improvements in expansions to existing facilities, we’re not going to ask our citizens for money. We’re not going to have to borrow to make those improvements. There just aren’t many cities of the size of Smithville that can say it has less than a million dollars in debt and $2.5 million in reserves.”
In 1990, according to Poole, ” the general fund had almost $900,000 in cash. The city had some debt, we’re not exactly sure how much that was, but let’s just say there was none, so let’s say we had a cushion of $900,000. Today in the general fund, we have $3 million in cash and there’s no debt. That’s $3 million that the city has as a cushion.”
“We budgeted for the city to receive $2.4 million in revenues for the year but the city actually received almost $2.5 million. I think it was $2,476,000. It tells me that we’re doing a good job with our budgeting and it’s nice to see that we exceeded our budgeted amounts in revenue. The City of Smithville revenue streams, historically, have been very solid.”
“The final budget for the year was $1.9 million, but we only spent $1.7 million. That’s $200,000 that could have been spent, but wasn’t. When you have revenues exceeding your budget by $75,000, and you spend $200,000 less that what you budgeted then you kind of get the feeling where these surpluses that we can use for these nice capital projects, without borrowing, come from.”
Poole added, “To me, the picture is pretty rosy with steady revenue streams, expenses have been under control, the monies have been well taken care of and those monies are being invested in safe investments, but are yielding competitive rates that we get from cd’s at the banks.”