Macoupin County Finance Committee met March 7.
Here is the minutes provided by the committee:
I. CALL TO ORDER
PRESENT: Thomas, Harding, Armour, Kiel, Lewis, Rull, Tranter, Dragovich, Duncan, Deihl, Watson, Bock
ABSENT:
II. AGENDA ITEMS
1. Audit Report Presentation FY 17-18
Crystal Bock from Scheffel and Boyle discussed the FY 2017-2018 audit. She walked through presentation report. She said they had received cooperation from the county officials and employees this year and had no significant disagreements or misstatements in the past year. She also walked through the side letter of potential improvements that could be made. There were three issues on the letter, which is less than in previous years and she hoped that two of the issues would be resolved in the following year as improvements have been made. Bock also said that the audit found the county had a clean, unmodified report for the fiscal year, the best they could achieve. Bock then walked through the revenue received. The property tax distributions have been able to level out where we receive 4 distributions a fiscal year however, because of the new property tax system, it is easier to have a more accurate distribution which means the first payment was significantly higher than it had been previously. That meant the distribution was significantly higher than it had been and inflated the surplus dollars. The surplus was also inflated as the reimbursement for the probation officer salary was held up and much lower in FY 16-17 and they were playing catch up in FY 17-18. Instead of the typical $200,000 they county received for that a fiscal year, they instead received over $400,000. The surplus shown in the audit included this ‘additional’ money. Overall, the general fund saw revenue up $983,000 and expenses were up $108,000.
2. Mid Year Budget Review FY 2018-2019
Clerk Duncan walked through the midyear budget review for the general fund. On the expense side, most offices and departments were right around the 50% mark that they would be looking for at this point. The Circuit Court budget was above, but that would be discussed in the next agenda item. Overall, 47.64% of the budget has been spent at this point. On the revenue side, overall the General Fund has brought in 44.24% of the projected revenue for the year. Property taxes are down at this current point, but they should pick up again when the bills go out this summer. It looked like there has been one less income tax distribution than we had received the year before, explaining the difference there. Fines and fees are also down and Duncan provide data that the Public Safety committee requested regarding how many tickets had been written and fees collected by the County this year. Duncan projected out based on the revenue received right now, the county would have about a $100,000 surplus, but that is somewhat troubling since he had projected $400,000 brought in for federal prisoners, none of which had been budgeted for so if that money was not there, there would be a significant deficit.
3. Supplemental Appropriation for Circuit Court Fund
Judge Deihl spoke about the request for additional funding for the Circuit Court. Last summer, there were two contractual conflict public defenders who would now longer be wiling to handle those cases at the salary they were receiving. A full time Assistant Public Defender was hired to help cover those costs. Over the first six months of the fiscal year, nearly all of the budget has been eaten up with paying for appointed attorneys at an hourly basis for cases where they are mandated to appoint or appoint due to multiple parties being required. The number of cases has increased significantly, particularly juvenile cases which have more than doubled. The Courts committee had recommended increasing the budget by $115,000 to help cover these costs, which would include hiring three conflict attorneys at $3,000 a month to handle any appointments required more than the Public Defender and Assistant Public Defender can not handle. There was discussion about the significant increase to the Circuit Court budget and that it would more than likely be a permanent increase to the budget moving forward. The judge explained that the previous set up before last summer was a great deal for the county and the attorneys finally realized they were spending a lot of hours for a smaller amount of pay. After six months worth of data, it is clear just having the hourly rate is not going to be a sustainable solution. Clerk Duncan explained that the draft resolution showed increasing the Circuit Court budget in an equal amount to decrease the insurance line item to make it budget neutral.
Motion by Tranter, seconded by Harding to recommend the resolution to the full board.
4. Quarterly Report on Work Comp and Property Claims
Thomas said this was a request they had back in December for getting quarterly reports on worker's comp and property claims. The report given to them was more extensive than they were looking for as they really just wanted to see if there was a new claim, not a full listing of every claim. They were going to see if next quarter they could get that.
5. Quarterly Report on Time Off Accumulations
Clerk Duncan explained that all offices and departments were now on the website to track time off accumulations. The Sheriff's department is on, though still transitioning to make sure it all works correctly. Duncan walked through how to read the report's columns and what they mean. Tranter said this provides much more information than they ever received before.
6. Update on Financial and Payroll Software
Clerk Duncan ran through a summary of updates regarding some of the additional features that the financial and payroll software were supposed to help cure.
Time Off Accumulation - Software offered by Zobrio and paid for is not workable for Macoupin County. For example, when we start a payroll, time off requests for that period is closed. If someone were to take a day any time between when we started a payroll and the start of the next pay period, I would have to manually go in an adjust their time. Depending on when pay day hits, we start payroll 4 to 5 days before the pay day, or 1/3 of the total pay period we would need to manually adjust. We now are spending additional money to pay for the time off website my office used before. We also don’t have a way to calculate what our exposure for paying out the time off is since none of this information exists in the system with the salary rates are.
Budget Requests and Tools - Software offered by Zobrio and paid for each year. They have never completed the set up for us, haven’t discussed it with us in 8 months. Not usable. The budget request option we had used last year will not reflect any amendments to a budget, only the original budget. We are not able to import the budget into the system as we were promised we’d be able to so we still have to manually add the budget. Manually have to do projections instead of the system doing projections as we were promised.
Officials and Department Heads Entering Their Own Bills - Software offered by Zobrio had additional costs of the contracted price. It was originally supposed to be included as part of the price we pay yearly. Based on previous experience with the additional software listed above, I don’t believe it’s worth getting as we will more than likely pay them additional money and get a solution that doesn’t work in return.
Revolving Loan Fund Receipting - Additional software at additional cost was required in order to handle the invoicing and receipting as promised. Instead, we have to manually create invoice, enter in multiple receipts, and manually track all payments just as the old software. This takes a considerable amount of time based off for the number of loans we had.
http://macoupincountyil.iqm2.com/Citizens/FileOpen.aspx?Type=15&ID=3493&Inline=True
Alerts Sign-up