11/06/2002 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Council Minutes 11/6/2002 WEB activities. He will be coordinating with the Mayor and the Safety Director regarding this correspondence. Sometime in the near future, there will be some legislation before Council on this matter. 12) He and the Mayor have discussed a better coordination with respect to getting information out to other members of the administration and to the Council involving issues on the library construction. It's an important issue to Council. He and the Mayor are on the same page in trying to get at least some type of summaries from these library project team meetings out to Council and administration members so that, if there's anything that is being overlooked on sensitive issues, there are additional sets of eyes going through it. 13) As a brief comment on yesterday's elections, particularly the votes on the city's three Charter amendments, he thinks that once again the voters have demonstrated their wisdom at the polls. Two of the issues, the Landmarks Commission and elected Council member amendments, easily passed. The interim appointment proposal got a lot of attention. It was beset with controversy all year, and it was defeated by the people. Finance Director Copfer: 1) On October 22, she and the Assistant Finance Director attended the Auditor of State's seminar on GASB 34, which is the new financial reporting model that is required for fiscal year 2003. However, we will be required to restate our 2002 year-end financials. 2) She has been working with the Mayor, his administration and Mr. Dubelko on the 2003 appropriations. Budget meetings have been held with each department. 3) She received the 2003 property tax estimates for the city. Overall the property taxes went up 1% from what they were projected to be this year, which is what we expected. 4) The local government funding had a nominal increase, but there are already rumblings that the State is going to continue to have more serious problems and that's still on the chopping block. It went up a little bit because their fiscal year is different than ours, so we' 11 get half the benefit of their increase for the next year. 5) The estate taxes, even though the laws have changed, there still are estates that are trickling in under the old rules. There are about $90,000 worth of returns that have been filed that we will receive in the first half of 2003, which is usually the larger collection period. She cannot predict what we will end the year with. She can say with confidence that it's going to be greater than zero, and that's the important thing. When you look at the prior year when budgets were more flexible, we've traditionally not spent between two and five percent of our budget. Obviously, this budget is tighter so she does not expect it to be at the 5% range. She has been spending a lot of time analyzing the 2002 expenses, looking for potential shortfalls, and the expense line items are looking great for the end of October and beginning of November. That's a tribute to the department heads who are managing their budgets on a daily basis. They're really looking out for the city. She does not see any glaring shortfalls. The property casualty insurance line item as budgeted was adequate to cover any increases. It's not going to cause any additional needs in the General Fund or any other fund. NOMBL may have to transfer $400, but they have a little more flexibility in their budgets. 6) When looking ahead to 2003, the Ohio Police and Fire Pension funds have started a program, which is a deferred retirement program for police and fire. The intent was to keep experienced people on the force in the needs of safety and security. Right now there