Turns out, City of DeKalb’s press release this week about hiring outside help has a backstory, and the Daily Chronicle has unearthed it.. New DeKalb City Manager Anne Marie Gaura wants the city to hire an outside financial expert after staff recently broke rules for making purchases in excess of $20,000. … First, the council…
Tag: budget
Painting a Picture of DeKalb’s Pensions
First, let’s update our pension percentage-funded chart with the FY2013 numbers. These are from Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs). [easychart type=”line” width=”420″ title=”Yearly Funding of Pensions by Percentage Funded” groupnames=”IMRF, Police, Fire” valuenames=”’99, ’00, ’01, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09, ’10, ’11, ’12, ’13” group1values=”101.47, 109.49, 111.34, 107.18, 98.78, 82.83, 72.48, 73.17,…
Stop Wasting the Financial Advisory Committee on Budgets
From a Northern Star article this week: City manager Anne Marie Gaura said the finance committee typically reviews the budget and looks at policy recommendations and general fund balance. “The goal is to utilize the finance advisory committee in the most effective means of how to benefit the budget and the community,” Gaura said. “It’s…
More Charting of the CAFRS: General and Special Revenues and Expenditures
As in the last post, I’ve gathered year-over-year information using City of DeKalb’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (CAFRs) as reported to the Illinois Comptroller. All governments have to do CAFRs and we ordinary citizens are supposed to be able to understand them. As a layperson I try to figure out why and how the numbers…
The Biernacki Regime: A Cautionary Tale
The City of DeKalb did me a HUGE favor. When I first went to look for the FY2013 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) earlier this month, it hadn’t been uploaded to the city’s website yet (though it is there now). So, I turned to the Illinois Comptroller’s online collection of local government reports instead. The…
November 25 Council Agenda
The city has put up another meeting agenda for tomorrow that’s a revision of the original, so all you early birds will have to read the new one. However, keep the old one handy because they didn’t include the rest of the packet with the revision. Highlights: Item 1: Another hit to the Public Safety…
DeKalb – Firefighter Quid Pro Quo
The City of Springfield is expecting to approve a new contract with its firefighters’ union soon. Golly, I wish we had that kind of news coverage. Remember the last-minute hoop we had to jump through to find what the 2011 contract with our firefighters was about? The Springfield story reminded me that the longish closed…
Sustainable is the Last Thing This Is
A Chronicle article last week talks about all the new building, equipment and personnel the City of DeKalb is investing into its fire department. I read the article after just having skimmed through the city’s check register for August. The police department spent, among other things, $125,000+ on software and $2600 on the new dog,…
Public Safety Consolidation ‘Inevitable’
A new article from the Better Government Association explores growing pressures to consolidate public safety services. …[M]unicipal budget shortfalls are forcing a growing segment of Northern Illinois suburbs to consider what was once unthinkable: Merging basic hometown public safety operations with neighboring or regional governments, such as the county sheriff’s departments. Skittish residents, however, are…
Manipulation Analysis
Is the City of DeKalb postponing action on its consultants’ recommendations for political or other selfish reasons? When the financial consultants known as Executive Partners, Inc. (EPI) first came to town in 2009, the City of DeKalb made a big deal of them. DeKalb needed to show it was doing something about its financial mess,…