01/07/2003 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Council Minutes of 1/7/2003 Finance Director Copfer: 1) The revenues ended above plan. Income tax remained strong in December and ended the year at 3.46% over plan. The majority of that increase was still in the net profit azea. As stated before, this is a very unreliable source as it fluctuates significantly from year to year. She provided Council with a packet this evening delineating historical data by the type of income tax, withholding, net profits and individual and also the monthly collections for the last year. She anticipates discussion during the budgeting process on this. 2) The property taxes ended at plan. There is an exempt collection that comes in right at the end of the year that brought us right to where we should be. That is good news. 3) The County Auditor was late in sending out the property tax bills. The Finance Department fielded numerous calls about the bills. One question was: "Does this tax bill include the 7.9 mill levy passed in 2002?" Yes, it does because this bill is for 2002 taxes which are collected in arrears. Another question was: "Why does the library cost so much?" The category "library" on the tax bill is the Cuyahoga County Regional Public Library system tax levies. The 1.1 mill that the city is using to construct the new library building is in the city portion of the tax bill and has been since the 2001 tax bill for 2000 collected taxes. The city tax rate has not gone up since then. 4) The final tax valuation from the county for 2003 receipts, which is 2002 taxes, showed assessed valuation in total declined .3%. The residential real estate is up slightly at .1% and other real estate is up by .9%. However, what is bringing it down is the public utility and general tangible personal property, which are down 8% due to state legislature changes in, 2001. It is declining every year. The public utility is part of the state plan to allow public utilities to compete. The state legislature changed the valuation of their assets because they had a lot of infrastructure and in order to open it up to other utility providers, they had to reduce those assets. Therefore, our taxes on those assets goes down. The second is the eventual elimination of the tangible personal property taxes for businesses, which is like inventory tax. This will be over 25 years, and we are in year three of it. So it will go down each year until it is eliminated. 5) Although the books are still in the process of being closed, she can safely say that the transfer from the General Fund to the Springvale operating fund will be under $20,000. A special thank you to her staff for processing all but three of the December open purchase orders before year end. Enabling this actual processing instead of having estimated standing purchase orders reduced the amount by about $20,000 of what we would have to transfer from the General Fund to Springvale. Councilman McKay, chairperson of the Finance Committee: 1) The Finance Committee met on Monday, December 23. Present were committee members Kasler, Limpert and McKay; Councilmen Nashaz, Gazeau and Miller; Council President O'Grady; Mayor Musial, Law Director Dubelko, Service Director Creadon, Safety Director Jesse, Engineer Deichmann, Systems Supervisor Binggeli. The following items were discussed: Ordinance 2002-175, an ordinance creating a new Section 131.01 of the Administrative Code entitled "Mayor's Contract Authority" in order to provide the Mayor with limited authority to execute contracts involving expenditures of $5,000 or less, without expression Council authorization and declaring an emergency. Ordinance 2002-175 was held in committee for the purpose of evaluating corrtracts 7