I am usually very impressed with the City of Asheville’s Finance Department, and angered by the accounting practices of Democrats who treat money as a nonzero-divergence quantity and employ techniques of addition and subtraction that can’t be verified with fingers or calculators. At Tuesday’s city council meeting, I was dumbfounded by the assertion that with less revenue and more spending the city had more dollars in its fund balance. The following is taken from the third and final round of questions:
Yours Truly: This is where I get confused. Back when the proposed budget was $129.9M or $116.7M, unreserved fund balances were around 25-30%. Now, the estimated FY 08-09 budget is smaller ($91M) and the estimated unreserved fund balance is smaller (~18%). Usually, a smaller percentage of a smaller number is going to be smaller, but I thought I heard [Asheville City Councilwoman] Holly Jones and [City CFO] Ben Durant say that the funds in the unreserved fund balance were greater now than they had been. . . .
Budget Director Tony McDowell:
These numbers may help:
Last year:
FY 06-07 year-end available fund balance in the general fund: $21,851,811
FY 06-07 general fund expenditures: $82,396,233
FY 06-07 fund balance %: 26.5%
Current year:
FY 07-08 est. year-end available fund balance in general fund: $16,525,600
FY 07-08 est. general fund expenditures: $91,382,422
FY 07-08 fund balance %: 18.1%
And thus we see that 16 is greater than 21. Q.E.D. I invite clarification.
