MOBILE, Alabama — With Mobile’s fiscal year winding toward its September close, Finance Director Paul Wesch told the City Council that the city is running ahead of revised revenue projections, even as a lingering dispute over the previous year’s budget figures resurfaced at a council meeting and a later Finance Committee session.
Revenue running ahead of projections
Wesch said city revenues have come in $2.1 million better than the revised budget approved in April, and roughly $8 million above the more conservative estimates originally set under the previous mayoral administration. He cautioned, however, that the good news should be weighed against expenses still to come and unforeseen costs. As one example, he pointed to workman’s compensation spending, which had already reached $2.8 million against a full-year budget of $3 million with more than three months still remaining in the fiscal year, which runs from October through September. Department heads were finishing their operational budget requests for fiscal year 2015 that same week, ahead of a preliminary spending plan expected before the council the following month.
A councilman defends the past administration
The discussion took a turn when Councilman Fred Richardson raised objections to how the prior year’s finances had been characterized. Richardson had shared a page from the city’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report on social media, pointing to a $3.3 million total fund balance at the close of the 2013 fiscal year as evidence the city was not, in his view, left in a deficit by the previous administration.
A dispute over which numbers matter
Wesch countered that the total fund balance figure Richardson cited blends together restricted money, including grant funds that legally cannot be used for general city operations, with the unrestricted money that actually pays day-to-day bills. He said the unassigned fund balance, the pot that funds general operations, started fiscal year 2013 at $11.3 million and ended it at a $4.3 million deficit, a shortfall that prompted the current administration to revise the fiscal year 2014 budget earlier in the year. Councilwoman Bess Rich, who has been critical of how the prior budget was handled, urged Wesch to explain the distinction more clearly to the public, saying the nuance between total and unassigned fund balances needed to be communicated plainly. Wesch responded that the city’s outside auditor had already laid out the situation clearly in its transmittal letter, and Richardson said he agreed it was time to move past the dispute, while still defending the previous administration against blame for wrecking the city’s finances.