So, this is what Water Board President Lauren Cnare had to say about this little $6M snafu. If Denise DeMarb had not been asked, the powerpoint slides about what the water utility board thinks would not have been presented. What they have to say and what she explains sounds different than what I blogged about yesterday and the memo that the council got from the Water Utilty Manager Tom Heikkenen.
Former Alder Lauren Cnare has been on the Water Board for 15 years and she is now the president. She was called up at the last minute to answer some questions from Denise DeMarb.
Denise DeMarb asks if the Water Board charge is from the PFC or the common council. Cnare says its through city ordinance.
DeMarb asks what their current charge is? Why didn’t the board understand or dig into this earlier? Cnare says that they receive reports just like all other boards and commissions. The reports we say in 2016 and 2017 did not indicate this. It was as much of a surprise to them as the staff and you and the public. The reports all looked fine. When we do budgeting with they we receive the same budgeting updates that you do. We talk about what we will do operating wise and capital wise. They do ask the questions about how the revenue will be generated, what the big projects are coming forward. We felt confident at that time that the budget number would match and it would work out. And they haven’t.
DeMarb says she isn’t surprised to hear her say this, but has they been talk on the board or ideas put forward to strengthen your position? This is when Cnare shows the powerpoint. She says they support the efforts of the staff to fix this. She thinks the most important thing they need to do is moving on to Munis (the city’s finance software.) This is a key piece to making it come together. She says the board has spent a lot of their time on water quality and conservation. She says that people who were here for the manganese years know that the job one was to make sure the water quality satisfied the customers. Perhaps we spent too many years and too much time focusing on that and reaching our conservation goals early. The entire board and the alders (Arvina Martin and David Ahrens) and people who have come and gone from the Board have decided that finance is job number 1. You’ll see the issues they want to see happen, they want a dashboard and they want the retiring members to be replaced with finance people. They have the science figured out, its not time to pay attention to the money and to make sure that they provide this high quality product at a reasonable price without coming to you looking for additional funds to make sure the system continues to run. She tells them to read the suggestions and invites them to email her or the board members and they’d be happy to sit down and chat with them.
- Provide more real-time data
- Develop for monthly use a “dashboard” showing YTD revenue and expenses, highlighting anticipated
variances, potentially other critical financial numbers - Provide perspective
- Add 5-year rolling revenue-to-expenditures comparisons to identify trends
- Deeper dollar dives
- Highlight assumptions underlying revenue projections
- Call out less predictable assumptions, e.g., weather, rate increase timing
- Provide high-low options for approval
- Treat anticipated rate increases as “iffy” until granted
- Share line-by-line operating budget drafts with board
- Other requests:
- Report: property sales’ impact on future well sites/master planned items
- Continue: discussion of Water Utility Board’s role in the rate increase
- Explore: hiring freeze, report on pros-cons
- Report: Water Conservation House project costs, including costs to rent property
for short, medium and long-terms
They ran out of time . . . .
