By NICK BUDD
Hays Post
At Thursday’s Hays city commission meeting, commissioners voted 3-0 to accept the 2013 budget audit prepared by Adams, Brown, Beran and Ball of Hays. Mayor Henry Schwaller and Commissioner Shaun Musil were absent.
Kansas statutory law requires each municipality to put together an audit by an outside firm so that it “represents an unbiased opinion of business practices and financial soundness of all city funds.”
According to the report, at the end of 2013 the city had a total cash balance of $46,028,771, which is an increase of $2.7 million from the end of 2012.
“Part of that is due to the fact that the city has been putting money and funding away in order to pay for future projects so that the city does not have to go out and obtain financing for those projects,” explained Melissa Romme of ABB&B.
Romme also cited the increase to some improvements made to the city in 2014.
All of the assets in Hays were valued at $167 million by ABB&B. The total amount of assets without any debt or liabilities totaled approximately $89 million.
Total governmental expenses, which do not include the water, sewer, solid waste, or waste water management funds, totaled $28,497,000. Some of the revenue sources that paid for these expenses were capital funds, and the AIP grant recently approved by commissioners to renovate the airport, but the city still had to cover approximately $20 million of these expenses.
“To retire the rest of those expenses, the city had property taxes and sales tax,” Rommee said. “Some of those property taxes were ad lorum sales taxes such as the airport operating fund, employee benefit fund and the public safety fund.”
These funds left the city with around $21 million worth of total governmental revenues and transfers in 2013, which left the city in a net positive position of $812,000. Romee mentioned that the city did anticipate this positive outcome when the 2013 budget was built.
Total revenues equaled $26 million at the end of December, which is an increase of $3 million from 2012. Romme pointed out that some of the increase was due to the airport grant from the FAA, but most of the other sources stayed the same.
Rommee also mentioned there were no violations and the report that was submitted by the city was qualified to be examined by the government.
Ken Beran of ABB&B said the firm begins the early work on the Hays audit in January and finishes it in March and April. He also said the city does a great job with their accounting practices.
“You have a good accounting system and adequate controls. This is something that we don’t always see when we audit a lot of the smaller cities when you don’t have a number of people doing the work. You’ve got a good system that works very well.”
After their vote, commissioners complimented Beran and Romme on their work.
The city is currently working on the 2015 budget and a public hearing is scheduled for August 14.