When Kaua‘i starts its budget process in a couple months, officials say they will look at how the county managed to end the past fiscal year with a $17 million surplus. Finance Committee Chair Jay Furfaro presented the June 30,
When Kaua‘i starts its budget process in a couple months, officials say they will look at how the county managed to end the past fiscal year with a $17 million surplus.
Finance Committee Chair Jay Furfaro presented the June 30, 2007, budget summary to County Council yesterday at the Historic County Building.
The county started the fiscal year with a $9.2 million surplus, he noted, but ended much higher for reasons that will not be entirely known until the audit is completed.
The surplus increase is largely due to the county not spending $10.7 million on budgeted items such as equipment contracts and staff positions, Furfaro said after the meeting.
For example, the county last year identified a need for two more council support positions and a full-time auditor. Since those jobs were not filled, Furfaro said, the budgeted money shows up as unencumbered expenses.
In other words, the county’s inability to find qualified employees to fill these vacancies and empty posts in other departments, such as Parks and Recreation, has translated into a bigger pool of unspent money than anticipated.
Councilman Mel Rapozo announced at the meeting that he will oppose creating any new positions unless an old position is taken off the budget.
Revenues coming in higher than expected is one thing, he said, but $10 million in unspent money is another.
Furfaro noted in the summary some $6.4 million in overages from forecasted revenues.
“We’re not budgeting properly,” Rapozo said, if 13 percent of the county’s roughly $140 million budget is unappropriated surplus. “That’s a lot,” he said.
While the larger surplus makes it easier when the county runs into issues such as emergency repairs, Rapozo said, the unspent amount is too much to not “tighten our belt.”
When the new budget comes across, Rapozo said, the county may have to look at pulling out positions it has not been using.
The public is going to ask why the county ended with an 88 percent increase in its surplus, Kapa‘a resident Glenn Mickens told council.
That answer will come with the audit, Furfaro said, which is about six weeks behind schedule.
The audit will help the county examine why the unencumbered expenses were higher than projected, he said.
When the county budgets for something, such as $500,000 to map important agricultural lands, if a contract is not issued the same fiscal year, that money is not encumbered and therefore expires, Furfaro said. It then ends up being counted as surplus.
The procurement process is long, Rapozo said, that is “the nature of the beast of government.”
Furfaro underscored how the county begins each year with an identified surplus, again noting that last year this was roughly $9.2 million.
“You don’t start the year with a zero balance,” he said after the meeting. “If there was a shortfall, you can’t just raise the room rate.”
Furfaro noted that the numbers in his presentation were unaudited figures.
“The good news, he said, is that no department exceeded its allocation.”
