Or is it $16 million? Or $11 million? Nobody knows.
A chart buried deep in the CEO’s “Q1-Budget Presentation for FY25-26” prompted a very surprised reaction from Mendo’s historically in the dark Supervisors on Tuesday.
Turns out, according to the chart, innocuously labeled “FY 2025-25 Close Out,” that Mendo has an “unaudited General Fund carryforward” from last year of over $12 million dollars.
The chart provided a brief breakdown of the newfound carryforward (unspent revenues from the previous fiscal year):
Property Taxes – increase of $4.15 million
Property Tax in lieu of VLF revenues - $815,000
Cost Plan – increase of $1.36 million
Transient Occupancy Tax – increase of $805,000
Interest — increase of $2.5 million.
The chart says there’s about $99 million in “year-end non-departmental revenue,” (known colloquially as the “General Fund”) but the components listed on the chart (above) add up to only about $9.6 million. Actual general fund expenses totaled about $83.6 million, for a carryforward of about $12.2 million. A footnote says that the $12.2 million “Includes unavailable Fair Market Value in the amount of $1,024,187 for a total of $11,133,578.” But $99 million minus $83.6 million is almost $16 million, almost $4 million more than the chart’s claim of $12.2 million in “unaudited carryforward.”
First some county finance lingo.
VLF is the County’s share of vehicle license fees. Nobody knows why it was higher than budgeted.
The “cost plan” is where the County can include qualified overhead costs when they bill the state and the feds for local (mostly) social services. So that $1.36 million probably means they got more overhead cost reimbursements than they thought they’d get for the prior fiscal year.
The “Unavailable Fair Market Value” simply means that the County’s investment pool of stocks and bonds has gone up in value but isn’t real cash on hand.
Nobody is quite sure why the property tax revenues were more than $4.1 million over what was budgeted, although a couple of the County’s financial officials suspected that it had to do with “escapes” (i.e., the County finally getting around to identifying and collecting delinquent taxes from as many as four years ago).
Nevertheless, whatever the amount is — nobody at Tuesday’s meeting expressed the slightest interest in why the carryover chart’s numbers didn’t add up — it is being eyed very closely by the County’s general fund department heads, especially the Sheriff/Jail, the DA and the Probation Department which make up most of it. Like other General Fund departments, they have had to cut their budgets by 6%, only to find out now that there’s millions of dollars in carryover/surplus.
County CEO Darcie Antle and her staff as well as Auditor-Controller Treasurer-Tax Collector Chamise Cubbison said that the surplus is mostly one-time money and should not be expected to be realized in the future as ongoing revenue. One-time money is historically allocated to reserves and facility repairs and upgrades, not to department operations. Therefore, what the Board will do with the surprise surplus remains to be seen.
Leave it alone. A rainy day fund is a good idea.