Planning Commission - workshop

Testing. Okay.

Good evening, testing. I can hear myself. So good evening. We'll get started. Thank you so much for coming out during this summer, July evening. I know that your time is valuable, and so we'll get started on time. Thank you for attending. I'd like to say a couple of words on behalf of Chairwoman Andreola because she regrets that she could not be here this evening. Washoe County remains committed to transparency and making it easier for our residents to understand how public dollars are collected, allocated, and spent. While this information has always been publicly available through our budget documents and financial reports, the Washoe County Checkbook makes it much easier to explore county revenues and expenditures in near real time. We update every night. Budget 101 has become an important part of our commitment to public engagement. This session is designed to walk residents through how the county's budget is developed, explain the decisions that shape it, and provide opportunities to ask questions and learn more about the process. For those who couldn't attend tonight, this presentation is being recorded and it will be available on our YouTube channel. We encourage everyone to watch it, share it with others, and reach out with your questions. the washoe checkbook continues to build on nevada's commitment to open government and financial transparency developed in coordination with statewide transparency efforts this tool gives residents direct access to the county financial information and supports informed civic engagement so that's from our chairwoman and again she regrets that she could not be here this evening but this is an event that she really spearheaded last year this is our second uh annual budget 101. We're very excited to be here. A little bit of housekeeping and then we'll get right into it. My name is Abby Jacobin. I'm your chief financial officer. I have been in this line of work since 2003, but here at the county since 2022, so about three and a half years. This presentation will be just over an hour. We've budgeted an hour and a half, but we usually spend about an hour. And then I have some frequently asked questions that I'll ask our teammates to answer that we couldn't naturally weave into the presentation, but are really interesting. And so now let me introduce my teammates. This is Comptroller Kathy Hill, and this is Budget Director Lori Cook. Kathy Hill has more than 15 years of experience in municipal government finance and many, many more than that in finance and accounting. She has a bachelor's of science in accountancy from UNR, and she is instrumental in preparing and disseminating and making sure that the financial statements are done accurately, correctly, transparently, and on time in the nationwide best practice format which is called the annual comprehensive financial report you can see that on our website and she's instrumental in that in addition she was instrumental in creating and publishing the checkbook which has been online for more than a year now but it's very exciting because it updates almost in real time and it gives you more access quicker to our financial information so thank you Comptroller Hill for that. And budget director Lori Cook. Lori has more than 20 years experience in municipal finance and an MBA. Lori is instrumental with her team at creating the county's budget book, and we present that budget book in, again, the Government Finance Officers Association best format, nationwide best format. And so we have won that award about 25 years in a row, 23-24.

We might be approaching 25 now. I know you know this.

And so that is something that is an amazing feat. It takes several months, and it's also on our website, and I know you'll be speaking about that. In addition, she's nationally recognized for revolutionizing the process of doing the budget internally so that we have more collaboration more listening, and we can do more innovative things with the same number of dollars. So that is something that we're very, very proud of. These are brilliant colleagues of mine, and I'm thrilled to turn this presentation over. Laurie will kick us off with the forecasting and the puzzle piece, and Kathy will take the floor second because she's going to be talking about actuals and where to find those in the checkbook and how financial reporting works. So here I'm going to turn it over to my esteemed colleagues and then I'll ask you some as we've done before I'll ask you some frequently asked questions that didn't weave themselves into the presentation and then ask you what questions you receive so that you can tell us and a Moment of housekeeping that I didn't think of if you have questions there There are little cards of paper in the back if you want to raise your hand if you have a question I'll run one to you and then we'll incorporate that into the Q&A at the end Thank You Nancy Thank you

Pretty good. So again, my name is Lori cook I am the division director of budget for the county have been in the budget division since 2013 the budget director since 2018, but I started with the county in 1999 so been around for a little bit and seen a lot of changes and I that's one thing is that we are fairly fairly small county so we do get a lot of interaction with other departments we have active department heads they carry caseloads so we don't have a lot of figureheads we have a lot of work so that goes into when we talk about budget and planning and strategic planning so we'll just start with I'LL START WITH BEING A LITTLE BIT CLOSER. SO I'M NOT GOING TO READ THIS BUT THE INTERESTING PART IN MY OPINION IS IN GOVERNMENT MOST TIMES WE'RE LAGGING SO WE'RE FOLLOWING THE PRIVATE SECTOR SO WHEN WE HAD implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley for example we followed so we follow best practice but something happens in the private sector we're like oh my goodness are we at risk in the in the government or in the public sector we might be and so we look at our best practice and our policies and our principles so this budget in and of itself actually comes from government it comes from you know handing out the budget and having the purse and then was incorporated into the the private sector vernacular So what is a budget? In its simplest form is the financial plan which funds the operation plan and it's also a communication tool. So it talks about where are we going to go. Obviously in the state of Nevada we do an annual budget where the state itself does a biannual budget, so two year budget. We can only do a one year budget. It doesn't mean we can't plan for future years, it just means we have one adopted budget at a time so one year at a time. So it represents our legally approved appropriations so basically we're identifying and telling the money where to go based on priorities and based on board action rather than wondering where it went or trying to figure it out on the back end. There's still some of that on the back end but it's the roadmap. and then the budget and the budget decisions are based on strategic priorities established by policy makers and there's just a list of different policy makers here but sometimes I somebody asked me if it was a typo and it's not you can see spouse on there right so if you're at home perhaps your spouse is your policy maker on what's prioritized and what you spend your money on but we have everything from the federal level all the way down to our board and it's not an exact science. So we're using estimates, we're using forecasts, we're using the information that we have, particularly when it comes to contractual, whether it's personnel or whether it's vendors, we use the information we have. We might not have a new renewal amount or those types of things and so we use our, we'll look at historical analysis and we do, you know, so it's educated, it's based on information, but it is still a forecast. actual cost almost never exactly matched the budget. So I tell this when I'm if I have a new analyst or if I'm working with departments if your budget matches your actuals to the penny there's probably a problem. There might not be but I would look at it. Or if you have an area where you have budget with no actuals or actuals with no budget those are the things you need to look at and make sure that things are appropriately either the budget needs to be corrected or maybe the actuals need to be adjusted. Moved not changed. it's not limited to money, right? So every budget time, you budgeted time to come here today, so time is a part of budget, supplies, energy, talent, skills, natural resources, that's, you know, pretty, it's not an all-extensive list, but I will, when I've talked to middle school kids, right, students, and they don't think they know what a budget is, and so I ask them, I say, well, what do you do for money? And, you know, I get allowance money, or one kid actually had like his own like landscaping business. And I said, okay, so then you have to budget time, right? Yeah. So where do you spend your money on? And it's amazing what eighth graders spend their money on. Um, but they budget it, right? They're like, well, I don't have enough money to get the skateboard. And a lot of them were talking about Timu. don't know why but they buy stuff from Timu so right so they're doing multiple budgeting and that's what we do like all the time every day so a lot of people think about budget as being you know this very formalized and for us it is a formalized process but we all do it so what could go wrong if we do not have a legally adopted budget per the requirements of statute which there's a lot of statutory requirements and Our previous year, so we just started this year with July 1, our previous year's budget would become our next year's budget and we would not be able to change that unless we got approval from the Department of Taxation. It could also go to the CLGF, the Committee on Local Government Finance, depending on what's going on with the county or the local entity. And then inaccurate and non-certified budgets also have potential impacts on our credit rating. So just like individuals, we have a credit rating. The county has a credit rating. And we are rated by Moody's and S&P. And it's, you know, double A plus stable. We got an upgrade about a year and a half ago, which is great news. But so if there's things that don't look right or things that don't go to plan, we have credit rating agencies as well as potential investors looking at this information routinely. So here is our timeline and we are continuing to update the strategic planning and the annual budget process. This year in particular we had a budget workshop in January which followed the initial outlook. That was new so it was public engagement as far as budget I think they're our national financial advisor, I don't want to use the wrong term, and then we had a local economic expert come in and give the board information, we had discussion. And then we had many, so rather than having a full board meeting, there were many three, I think, so far, that had specific topics related to the strategic plan and so that's strategic new strategic plan is being finalized as we speak so we and that was based on a rough report from spring a year ago so spring 2025 so making progress in that area but generally speaking this is the outline of the budget process so we start with well I'll talk about that in another slide but it's all year it's all year. So it is not we start here, we stop here and then we do all these other things. We really are looking at this all year, working with departments, meeting, talking about priorities, different things come through, things we don't plan for. So figuring out how to address those from a budget perspective. This is our cycle. Our budgeting process is incremental. It's otherwise known as base budgeting. So what happens is what a department or what the county has right now is their adopted budget rolls into the following year. We do make adjustments for information we know. So if we know there are collective bargaining agreements or contract increases or we're not in that building anymore so we're not leasing it anymore so we can reduce that budget, that's what we do as part of the base budget. and then departments will ask for additional resources. So we call that above base. Some people call it service level adjustment. Different agencies call it different things. We call that our above base. There are pros and cons to all of these different potential budget processes. So incremental has its own rate. We talked about it. That's why we're changing our process. You have things from maybe decisions from 40 or 50 years ago that are now kind of baked in as base. So how do you go back and review that and say is this the highest and best use of our resources? there's priority based so there's different ways you can have pro performance base where you have budget for performance or performance outcomes are used as part of that process program you can have a target based budget where this is how much money you have tell us what you know how you're gonna get there and then zero base zero basis is a can be used in isolated events but if we as a county tried to do zero base for an annual budget I think it would probably be I don't know if there would be riots, but there would be some chaos because you're building everything from the bottom up. You're starting from scratch. So those are just some different types of what we would see in local government. There are different opportunities for engagement, for public engagement. So we do have budget workshops. We have BCC meetings that specifically we talk about the financial forecast and the outlook. We also have formal public hearing for the financial It's a tentative budget but it's done when we adopt the final. There's online information. There's also, we have Washoe Leadership, Tahoe Leadership Academies, and then if there's other ideas for public engagement, send them to us, or whatever, however you want to submit it, because none of this is meant to not be available. It's all meant to be available, and the more people we hear from, the more our board members can prioritize, or the more they know the pulse of the community, right? I'M NOT GOING TO READ THESE. THIS WILL BE AVAILABLE ONLINE AS ABBY MENTIONED BUT THERE ARE A LOT OF DIFFERENT THINGS WITHIN THE BUDGET DIVISION THAT WE DO. SO THIS IS MY FAVORITE STATUTE I'LL BE HONEST. to spend money in excess of your appropriations. So if you ever see items come forward and we say we have to adjust the appropriations because we are very close or we feel like we're going to overspend in an area, we have to be within our legally adopted budget with every fund, so our general fund is our largest fund, but we have 22 governmental funds and six proprietary, so we have 28 funds total, and a 1.1 billion adopted budget. So you have to be your total bottom line. You have to be within your expenditure authority of your adopted budget or your adjusted. There's adjustments that happen during the year. And within your function. So like the general fund has multiple functions. It supports public safety and judicial and general government so the different functions which is will also be there's a list of those as well so we have to be those two we had to be within our budget appropriations by fund by function if it's willful so there's a department has is no care what you tell me I'm gonna spend what I need to spend that could technically be a violation of interest up to and including a misdemeanor so when we talk about the budget we need to have things in alignment we take us we take it seriously and our departments also take it seriously. So once the budget is adopted, there are different ways to adjust it. The most formal is an augmentation, but augmentations are highly regulated by the state. There are only certain circumstances that we can augment the budget or increase the appropriations for spending. There's carry forward adjustments like in restricted funding. So if we have donations and they're not all spent by the end of the year, that appropriation authority through year end and close out activities needs to be accounted for in the following year budget. New supplemental grants and donations so you might see those come forward where animal services is accepting you know donations for the quarter and they're increasing their budget to be able to spend those donations that they've received. AND THEN APPROPRIATION TRANSFERS WE CAN REALLOCATE NET ZERO SO MOVE BUDGET WITHIN A FUND CROSS FUNCTIONALLY WE CAN ALSO MOVE BUDGET ACROSS FUNDS YOU SEE THOSE AS TRANSFERS BUT THOSE GO TO THE BOARD SO THE BOARD APPROVES CROSS FUND THEY ACKNOWLEDGE CROSS FUNCTION BUT BASICALLY THEY HAVE TO GO TO THE BCC. These are some of our accounting policies. Now our financial policies are, it's a whole separate section in the budget book. So I, if anybody's interested, I direct a lot of people to those, but we do have a stabilization. The minimum is $3 million. Right now we have four. And then between 10 to 17% of fund balance. So think of that kind of like a savings. The state refers to there as rainy day fund. So in our general fund, it's 10% to 17%. The recommended or best practice is two months of working capital, so that's about 16.6% or 17%. We have some interesting, I don't want to say quandaries, but we have some interesting timing with that because we wait. So we get our last large property tax, which is our largest source of revenue in the county is property tax. We get our last large installment March-ish. and then we don't get our next large installment until August. So we're looking at funding and being able to fund those five months, four months of operations with the cash that we have in the bank, so to speak. So that's one reason why we're pretty conservative when it comes to how much do we have. It also helps us weather if there are downturns in revenues. It gives us some time to be able to make changes. And then another policy is to have a general fund contingency not to exceed 3%. Now 3% is a statutory maximum. This year in the adopted budget for fiscal year 27, we have a 2%. We are intending to get that increased to 3%, and those are things that are unforeseen. One time we need to respond to something or we need to do something, pay for something, and that's contingency. That also goes to the board. That is not a slush fund. That is not anybody goes in there and just takes it out. Contingency... is approved by the board and then the budget for the contingency goes where the board approves it. So we get questions about that as well. And these are just some revenue policies that the last bullet on there of avoiding specific revenues for specific programs unless legally required is one reason why we might get questions of how much does this geographical area provide in taxes and how much they receive in services. there's different ways to prorate that or try to come up with a methodology to allocate that but generally speaking it's especially in the general fund it's revenue in that supports right different fingers one exception to that which is not super new or relatively new is the short-term rental program so and the board adopted that with the fees to cover the cost of the program so that was a direction there are some legal mandates legal things that make those our special revenue funds are an example of that. So the property tax that is levied can only be used for that purpose. So the property tax levied for animal services can only be used for animal services. It can't be used for technology. Well, that's not a good example because they have their own tech. It can't be used for the sheriff's office. So there are some other legal restrictions there. So we have some policies here some description of the base budget the net zero budget adjustments, but basically The top or the first one on there is operating capital expenditures shall not exceed their total authorized departmental budget There's also some language in code that relates to that and the department has responsibility to stay within their budget So financial structure so when we talk about functions and the functions are on that left-hand side. So general government would be things like human resources, finance, technology services, some items in the manager's office, those types of things. So you can see all those. The ones that are on the bottom, utilities, building and safety, golf, and that, those are basically their own funds. So none of those funds commingle. But yeah, so they have their own functions, even though could you say that part of utilities might be public works? Maybe. But it's utilities for the function of the budget and how we report the expenditures. Then we have the fund types. So there are different fund types. So we have the general fund. It's a general fund. special revenue funds there are multiples debt service funds we have two capital project funds proprietary funds are well enterprise funds in particular they're meant to run like a business so they cover the cost if they have to to cut because building a safety is an enterprise fund then they make those adjustments and the idea is that well the reality is there's not a general fund subsidy so they pay overhead for example or a cost allocation and internal service funds are funds that support expenditures related to employees, so our operations, internal operations. So equipment services is one of those, like our fleet. Health benefits, so the health benefits program for county employees and retirees is one, and then risk management is the other. So, and then fiduciary funds are trust and agency funds, so things that we hold, but we're not really, I mean, we're not, WE DON'T BUDGET THOSE. THEY GET REPORTED IN THE FINAL AUDITED FINANCIALS, BUT WE DON'T BUDGET THOSE FUNDS. SO YOU'RE NOT GOING TO SEE THEM IN A BUDGET. SO WE START WITH, IF YOU WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT IN A WAY, THE GENERAL FUND IS THE MOST DISCRETIONARY, RIGHT? THERE'S THE MOST FLEXIBILITY WITHIN THE GENERAL FUND. SO I LOOK AT THAT ALMOST LIKE A CHECKING ACCOUNT. SPECIAL REVENUE FUNDS, SAVINGS MONEY MARKET, I DON'T KNOW IF years or young, I don't know if anybody remembers back in the day when we had you only use the money for your Christmas stuff, that would be a special revenue fund. It's restricted or it has a particular purpose. Our debt service funds, those are the things that you pay your debt from. So that would be like your mortgage, your vehicle, capital project funds, construction accounts. I don't know if anybody's had any experience with those or sometimes construction loans, right? You can only use it for that capital project or that home or whatnot. Then again, we have the proprietary funds. So the enterprise funds, the internal service funds, and then the fiduciary funds. So these have a little bit more definition than what I just said on the slide before. And then the structure. And the reason I bring this up is if you're looking at the financials, depending on what you're looking at, we basically are essentially, we start with the largest umbrella is the fund. So what fund does this belong to? Then we go to a fund center, which is for us as a department, and then you can have sub fund, which is a division, right? So they're building this way. Then within that fund center, they're called cost objects. So for example, the sheriff's office has a separate cost center for detention than it has for patrol. So those are budgeted and accounted for separately. Then within those we have, they're called general ledger accounts or GL accounts. A lot of people refer to them as line items. Those are the same across the whole county. So if you are charging something or something as a professional services, you're going to use the same GL account regardless of what fund it's being charged to or is paying for it. then we so within those general ledger accounts we have revenue we have expenditures and we have transfers so if you're looking at certain reports or if you're looking at the budget book and you see some of these numbers this is just kind of an outline of what do those mean so if you see a general ledger account that starts the four it's going to be a revenue if it starts with a seven it's going to be an expenditure so this is just kind of like a little legend and departments are identified in the state budget document and then in the budget book itself will show, we call them the sub funds or the divisions. LARGEST SOURCE OF REVENUE FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTY, PROPERTY TAX. THIS IS THE CERTIFIED BY THE TAX COMMISSION, NEVADA TAX COMMISSION. THEY MEET AND CERTIFY THE OVERLAPPING TAX RATES EVERY JUNE 25TH. IF IT'S ON A WEEKEND, THEY ADJUST. BUT THAT'S BY STATUTE. THEY HAVE TO CERTIFY THOSE. WE ARE AS A COUNTY AT THE CAP, SO WE'RE AT THE 364 CAP. AND AGAIN, THE is this the upper right hand corner? Upper right hand corner shows those different components of the total combined rate and then if you happen to be like in the city right incorporated city they have their tax rate if you the state of Nevada also gets 17 cents what we call it so a point one seven so the county itself with all of our funds and our one billion dollar budget that's not supported entirely by property tax with the county in and of itself is 1.3917 of the 364. So a little more than a third. And more information about, so there's a link in here, but there's more information about the tax commission and those certified rates and those overlapping property tax rates. So our total budget for the adopted budget and this information is also available when we did the presentation on May 19th. It was May 19th, right? This year. And so this is a total budget. So we have our general fund, total special revenue funds. So you can see obviously our general fund is our largest fund. So it's about half the budget and everything else is the other half. So we have and this includes when we look at the total appropriations that includes what expenditures transfers out in any contingency and we only have contingency in the general fund. If you only look at expenditures it's that 987 million but around that it's close to a billion. These are authorized FTEs, so full-time equivalents. So we add or combine our positions. So sometimes we have positions that are not full-time. The library uses, you know, various part-time positions, the Northern Nevada Public Health. So there are part-time or not full-time positions. So we add them and it creates an FTE, which means it's a percentage of a full-time. So if it's full-time, it's a 1.0. If it's 32 hours a week, it's a 0.80. But we can see here that We are now still below this 08, that fiscal year 08 number is pre-recession. So that's like what we, not that we're going to have intention to get there, but that's kind of what we, when we look at comparisons, what we peg to. And we are still below that number, but we've also had, I think it's approximately a 27 INCREASE IN POPULATION AS YOU CAN SEE. THIS IS FROM THE STATE DEMOGRAPHER. THEY GIVE US THIS INFORMATION EVERY YEAR. SO IT'S QUITE A FEAT AND SO A LOT OF TECHNOLOGY AND EFFICIENCIES AND DIFFERENT THINGS HAVE HAD TO OCCUR TO HAVE THAT HAPPEN BECAUSE WE'RE SERVING MORE PEOPLE WITH LESS PEOPLE. SO IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN this is the by function of all governmental funds so that's that group that doesn't have the proprietary funds in it so you can see general government, judicial, public safety, you can see those numbers in there. It's not a surprise public safety is the largest. The largest part of public safety is the sheriff, but the sheriff is not the only public safety budget. Juvenile services is public safety, the public guardian, the public administrator, the medical examiner's office, and emergency management. They're obviously smaller, but they're also part of that public safety budget. the general fund why do we talk about it so much it's half our budget and it funds pretty much every function other than the proprietary funds so we have uses we have sources right so sources could be things other than revenue but you could think of it as revenue and expenses and then you can see so we have a budgeted deficit we have a budgeted use of fund balance using our savings and we do our best to not have that happen but there are things that are, you know, there are things that sometimes have to happen. So going into 27, that's $5.6 million. If we zeroed out contingency, we wouldn't have that deficit, but zeroing out contingency gives us very, very little flexibility if something were to come up. This is a different way to look at the same information. So you can see sources on the left, uses on the right, And then, of course, that bottom line, you can see it. So that negative in the brackets is that use of fund balance. I think we're budgeted to be still higher than our fund balance policy of 10% to 17%. So we have to understand or give the board enough information of, well, what do we need to do or what do we want to do to get within that policy level? Transfers out are a large component of the general fund uses, and so this just lists the funds that are receiving transfers, and they're listed in order of largeness. So largest is at the top, smallest is at the bottom, and it just compares it to fiscal year 26, which was the year that just closed. You notice if there's one time, it will be noted in here as well. Here's the five-year forecast and this is based on the adopted budget and then the forecast at the time that the budget was adopted, things have already changed. There are things that have already happened that were not in the forecast. And we just were constantly updating it based on some of these things. And so the important part to see is that a declining fund balance rate That's not sustainable. It's a structural deficit. That's what the board and management is working so hard on right now is to make sure that we don't get even to 2030, right? So that whatever we need to do, we need to have time to do it, but we don't want to be reactive. We don't want to, you know, I'm not going to talk about any other agencies or whatever, but we don't want to have to make tough decisions tomorrow when we do have a little bit of time. So that is one advantage of having some additional fund balance is it gives us a little bit of it buys us some time for lack of a better way to say it. Again it's a forecast things have already changed fiscal year 26 when we finalized 26 is not going to match this fiscal year 26 estimate but I think it'll be close but it's not going to be And I don't know, I don't think last time, I don't know if I went through all the supplemental before I handed it over to you, Kathy. I don't want to bore anybody. But I love this slide because I've had both. And I guarantee you my dog would say the same thing about my cat, is that we just can't afford it. I'll go through it pretty quick. These are overviews of the different funds, so the governmental funds. So when we talk about health, it's Northern Nevada Public Health Library Expansion Fund. You'll see there's no budget in that for 27. That voter approved tax override did not, was not approved by the voters in November of 24. So that is that tax levy or that rate, that two cents was rolled into the operating rate. So that resides or lives in the general fund now. So there's no budget in that particular separate fund for 27. We did have budget in 26 because there was fund balance or savings in there that we need to spend by the end of June of 26, so three weeks ago. And then it just continues for all the governmental funds, so it outlines what those appropriations are. Here are our proprietary funds, so you can see building and safety. Our largest enterprise fund is utilities. And our largest, which shouldn't be a huge surprise, and our largest internal service fund is health benefits. By department, if you want to, if you're interested by department, so it's by function, and then also within department. So we have all kinds of different departments that are in there and it totals up their budgets. And you can see the contingency on the right and then the total government appropriations. Again, this is a different way to look at the proprietary funds and how they stack up or how their budgets are in total. And this is a different way to look at the five-year forecast with the projected through fiscal year 31. So that green line is ending fund balance. So it's not a percentage. It's actual dollars or anticipated dollars. And then you see the bar charts that compare sources and uses or revenue and expenditures. And that decline is what we need to work on for flattening. So with that, I talk a lot. Sorry, I like this. Kathy's going to talk about the checkbook.

Thank you.

I'm a little bit taller than Lori.

So after Lori's team has taken time to do the budget, now it switches over to the comptroller's department for actual expenditures and what the money is spent on by each of the departments, by fund, by function, by services that are provided. There's a quarterly expenditure reporting that's required to be advertised that's always available to everybody online. It will also, you'll see some expenditure information in the checkbook when we get there. And we also do quarterly financial reporting to the board. That is also mandated by Nevada Revised Statutes. It's important to note that when the quarterly financial statements go to the board, it is at a point in time. So at some point it may say, well, we have $20 million of surplus. I equate that to you got paid on Friday and you haven't spent your check yet. You don't really have that money, but it sure looks nice for that day that you're reporting it. And then we also have the annual reporting for the annual financial report. So, just a little background. For financial reporting, it's required that we follow many statutes, many guidelines, many best practices. And along those lines, we are audited by internal audit, external audit, program audit, state audit, federal audit, PERS audit, OPEB audit, Nevada revised statutes, Washoe County Code, and we follow generally accepted accounting codes, General Financial Officers Association, and follow all pronouncements for government ACCOUNTING STANDARDS BOARD AND WE ALSO GO THROUGH INSURANCE PROVIDER AUDITS. SO I, LIKE SHE LIKES BUDGET, I PARTICULARLY ENJOY AN AUDIT BECAUSE IT HELPS FIND HOW YOU GET BETTER AND HELPS ME SUPPORT WHEN I STAND UP HERE AND SAY THE FINANCIAL REPORTING IS ACCURATE, IT IS CORRECT. IT'S A GREAT WAY TO SAY THAT WHEN YOU PASS ALL THESE AUDITS THAT HAPPEN. AS AN EXAMPLE, NOW THE AUDITORS ARE HERE FOR THE SINGLE AUDIT WHICH IS OUR FEDERAL FUNDS, OUR GRANT FUNDS THAT WE RECEIVE. There will be approximately five auditors here for four weeks, and then when they do the other half of the audit, the financial audit, we will have six to eight auditors here for eight weeks. So I enjoy that. She enjoys budget. So now the presentation or demonstration I'll give you on checkbook, this is not new information. This has always been available in the annual comprehensive financial report. It is more time-sensitive information that you will have access to. So here's the checkbook that you can find on the Comptroller's website. It contains the information that Laurie just discussed with regards to the budget. And it's not up there, Josh. Technical difficulties. So when our tech guy gets me up to speed, how are we doing, Josh? Just one second. I'll be able to walk you through some demonstrations from the departments, from the divisions in the departments, and even drill down to who are the vendors that they're using to provide these services. Hi. It's just not up there. Thank you. I wouldn't go far because we're going to get to the actor. So there's there's an open seat right there. Okay, so here on the county's website, we're gonna we'll start over here for total spending.

If we click on explore.

Josh, it's going to work. I would recommend if you start at the top here, we have several fiscal years of information here for you. 2027 is where it lands on right now. We're just a little bit into 2027 and we're already starting our audit for 2026. So I would recommend that you go to 2026 and then it has the different funds that Laurie just discussed with everybody, the general funds, special revenue funds. We'll go to the general fund. You can click there. And now you can go to a particular department if you like. I'm curious how much the district court is spending, how much the county manager is spending to register our voters. So we'll go to district court. And then you see within district court they have court administration, general jurisdiction, family jurisdiction. And if you want to drill even further on the jury commissioner, how much is the jury commissioner spending each year? You can go down there and it'll tell you the vendors that they're using. They have legal expenses. We don't have the vendor name there. There's multiple vendors on that. Nevada pre-sort information such as that. If you want to change this, there's many different ways. I really, really ask that you go in and play around with it. You can't hurt anything. You can go left, right, up, down. Everything will give you the same information. So Vonage Business, that is our business provider, excuse me, our telephone provider. It'll give you a history of what our timeline is that we're spending it. Is it right on track or is it out of control? Has it changed over the years? If you're done with that, you can simply just click on the left and go back to jury commissioner. You want to go back even farther to district court. You can go up to district court. You want to find another department in the county. then you can go back up to the general fund and click on that and find a different department. Like Lori said, she used the sheriff's office as an example. They have many different divisions over there. They have detention, 911 Detention Services, Crime Lab Patrol Division. You can go, you can drill into there and see where the money is spent on there. If you wanna look at it for 2025, you can go to the top and go to 2025. That's the oldest year that we have on here. Or you can go back to division by group. Now all this information, where does it end up? It ends up in the annual comprehensive financial report that is on the comptroller's website as well. This information will include your budget, your budget to actual, and it's also reported in all three formats that Laurie explained, fund, function, and department. So you want to know how much is being spent on parks and recreation, You want to know how much is being spent at Reno Justice Court, medical examiners, you can go to that report and immediately see what numbers are there to satisfy your curiosity. It's a 300-page report, so you might want to maybe just read the verbiage. I know, right? A lot of pages. So are we back in demonstration mode? Thanks, Josh. You're a hero. So on that note, that I just kind of melded two final slides into one. That is your whole financial outlook from soup to nuts, budget to actuals, and all the hoops that we have to go through to make sure that you guys get the information.

And I did not do a demonstration, but I highly recommend going and reading our budget book, which is also available online. It's great. It's fabulous. I'm not even joking. It has a lot of information about services departments provide. There's narrative about the county itself. There's just a lot of really good information in it. It's not 300 pages, but there's a lot of good information in it. So apologies for not going to that, but it's on the budget page. You can actually just search budget book or budget in the search engine for the Washoe County website, and it should take you right to where you need to go. And we also have archives, so we have old ones. We have old budget books and old, we call that the state doc, and that's the adopted budget we send to the state. So those are also available, so prior years.

Testing? Ah, I can hear myself. So this is, I assume that that is the conclusion of the formal presentation and I wanted to ask you some questions that we hear in the street and then I wanted to ask you what you hear. Is that?

Yeah. Okay.

What are the most frequently asked questions that you receive? And either one of you can start.

Sure. I'll get questions of Why can't Department X just spend what they need to spend? I think we went over that. What is your budget process? So we talked about that as well. What does the budget consist of? So those are the, it's the plan, it's the appropriations. And I'm trying to think of a, just a, we just get so many that, And what I find is when we get questions about budget and it will be, okay, so what is the budget of this department? What the person really wants to know is how much are you spending? Not what did you plan to spend? How much are you actually spending? So the right question is, um, or what we have to filter through to get to the right answer rather is, um, oh, so you want to know what we spend it, what we spent, not what we budgeted. And there's obviously you don't want it out of context cause it's good to know the plan and the actual, But we do get that a lot, that kind of using that term interchangeably, what's the budget? Well, do you really want to know the budget or do you want to know the budget and or the actuals?

I think that's important because I think one of the things that made this simpler for me when I was a little bit new to this line of work is the budget is the law. When the board adopted the budget on the 19th of May, starting on July 1st of this year, it became the law. And Lori and Kathy went through how you augment or change our budget, but that's how serious of a framework it is for us to operate under. So thank you for that.

So in the comptroller's department, I have six divisions, so I get various questions of how can I get my invoice paid, how can I do business with the county, why do I owe you money, where can I get my W-2, why is my paycheck wrong, the risk fund. Yes, tell us what your six divisions are because it's very diverse and interesting. I have risk, purchasing, collections, accounts payable, accounting, and purchasing and payroll. I may have said purchasing twice. They're not my favorite. Don't worry about it. But yeah, so we get all kinds of questions internally as well as externally. All the employees tend to go through my department as well as vendors. People with public records requests, they want a copy of the contract. They want to know who does your landscaping along those lines, which is now an open checkbook.

That's an interesting point. You may not see us that often because our customers are the 24 departments, but many times we also do interface with the vendors and people from the public, but we are an internal services function mostly, and that's why we work mostly behind the scenes. So, Kathy, just to go into that a little bit more. If I'm a new vendor or a new business, how do I do business with the county? And then would you go into, if I'm local, do I get a preference? Because the law is really strict on this, and we get this question a lot, but there's a really clear answer.

Yes. So if you want to do business with the county and you have a particular business that you're doing, you're best off reaching out to the department, the department that would benefit from your services. making contact with them, talking with them. There are code and statutes that we have to follow based upon the dollar amount that your business may supply for the county and the funding source, whether it's grant funds or general fund. There are certain requirements that are met there as well. and then going from there if it is a large amount then the purchasing department will do a request for proposal or request for qualifications invitation to bid that is all public information and available on the website if you have a larger contract that you're looking at providing the services to the county for As far as local preference, we cannot solely rate on local preference. It's the county's responsibility to get the lowest responsive responsible bidder. So if we said we would only do local, that would not minimize the cost or the bidding cost. We can, however, offer through the rating a little bit higher percentage points for a local business, but just not on cost alone. And what we do as an example for Amazon, the county does use Amazon, and we worked with Amazon that for common purchases, local businesses pop up first to purchase the products. So we're able to do that.

Thank you. And this list is much larger than, it's the same, similar to last year, but it's much larger, but I won't need all the questions because you did such an excellent job of factoring in some of the items, such as talk about the general fund a little bit more and talk about where do all my tax dollars go to the county or are there other entities? So thank you for doing that. Those are questions that I get quite a bit. AND WHY DO WE HAVE OTHER FUNDS? I THINK THAT WOULD BE WORTH GOING INTO FOR MAYBE 30 OR 40 SECONDS IF YOU MIGHT, LORI. WHY DO WE HAVE OTHER FUNDS? WHY DOESN'T IT ALL JUST GO INTO ONE PLACE, THE REVENUE AND THE SPENDING?

generally speaking the first level is whether there's a legal mandate right so if we have a property tax rate for a special revenue fund it can be voter approved or it can be legislative override is what they call it it's a polite word for saying it's a mandate you're going to do this and so it has to be used for that purpose so we actually have a tax rate related to detention we have a tax rate related to family court those actually live in the general fund but then we have animal services we used to have library expansion we have REGIONAL PUBLIC SAFETY TRAINING CENTER THAT DOESN'T RECEIVE TAXES SO AGAIN THE DIFFERENT FUNDS AT THEIR VERY BASIS WE HAVE TO BUDGET BY FUNCTION AND WE HAVE TO BUDGET BY FUND SO THE SEGREGATION OF THE FUNDS AND NOT HAVING ANYTHING ROLL FOR THE GENERAL FUND ALLOWS US TO MAKE SURE WE'RE MEETING OUR LEGAL OBLIGATIONS OUR LEGAL REQUIREMENTS AND ALSO WE COULD HAVE A GOOD EXAMPLE IS THE PUBLIC SAFETY TRAINING CENTER We have local agencies and it's a participating, right? So it's Washoe County, City of Reno, City of Sparks, and we are the participating agencies. We contribute and then that funds that public safety training center, the one up on Spectrum. You wanna keep those separate. It's best practice to not only have your accounting represent what you're paying for to the level that does not become onerous, right? But also your budget. So there are a few reasons when it's best practice. And the idea eventually is that shows you the true cost of a program or the true cost of a department. But there are also legal requirements as well.

Can I also make the assumption that it helps us calculate rates more effectively and efficiently? For example, sanitation sewer rates. If we know what the spending is and it's all in one fund and then we calculate the rates correctly, we can make that a self-sustaining model and we're not subsidizing it with property tax or overcharging people. Is that fair to say? Thank you. I had one more question, and this might be something that people in the audience would want to know. If I want to have more influence or more say or input into the process of budgeting, strategic planning, financial reporting, or if I have questions, how do I do that? What is staff's role versus the board's role?

Come to my office.

How do I get more involved? Anyone?

I think it can, I mean, it can start, it doesn't have to be through a commissioner. I mean, it can certainly start there or end there or however you want to do that. But we do have certain centralized emails. I think my email might even, I mean, it's publicly available. It's not secret. It's lcook, it's my name at washoecounty.gov. Tell them mine, tell them mine. Okay, so Kathy's, her name is Kathy Hill, and so hers is chill at washoecounty.gov. So she has a cool email. I don't. But you can send those in as questions or whatnot, and we'll get them routed. I think public comment is another good way to get something on the agenda or something at a high enough profile level. Going through our manager's office, there's a lot of support there, 311. Sometimes They have a great team, and sometimes, actually, public records requests end up turning into something, it's informational, but it's also, there's follow-up and other things that we learn. We are going to, can I talk about that we're gonna be doing a survey? Can you talk about that?

Oh, yes, do it.

So our plan coming up in the next couple months is also to do a citizen survey or citizen outreach. And so, again, that's us pushing it out, but we're hopeful that with enough information, enough people know about it, if for whatever reason they're not on the end of coming through the survey, that they'll use it as an opportunity to push the information to us. So those are the big ones I can think of.

Thank you very much. Those are the questions that I receive in the hallway and that you have told me that you receive in the hallways and whenever you're interacting with our citizens. I did not see anyone raising their hands for... to enter a question, if anyone would like to, this is the time where you can always, my experts gave out their email addresses, mine is also online, and so for me, I have to listen to things, digest them, and then in the middle of the night, I'll have an excellent, or what I think is an excellent question that I wanna ask, and so we are, We are available to you. 311 is available to you. Our communications team is excellent, and they are available. And so we are here to help you understand the billion-dollar budget, because the number is daunting, but it's very transparent, as Ms. Hill and Ms. Cook described, and we're here to help you understand it and help you then engage in the process. Our goal for having this in the summertime, it seems kind of funny to have it in the middle of July, but now we're about to begin our budgeting process, and if people understand more, then they'll feel more engaged. And that was our goal for doing it, to kind of kick off the budget for the upcoming year. So thank you for coming. We're very grateful that you came. We know that your time is very valuable.

We thought there was going to be one person here. So this is pretty, this is good.

Thank you.