This is first of a series. DeKalb County Board voted recently to continue to help cover expenses for DeKalb County Rehab & Nursing Center (DCRNC) in the face of a worsening revenue picture. The board had approved a loan of $2 million last spring to improve cash flow issues resulting from a $2.8 million revenue…
Tag: budget
Water is the new TIF
For years, DeKalb bailed out its general operating budget with tax increment financing (TIF) funds. TIF administrative fees helped soften the blows following the 2008 market crashes and assisted the hiring spree after that. Now the enormous “TIF 1” district is gone, replaced by the “Downtown TIF” that is but a shadow of its previously…
DeKalb taps into regional water trends
The Better Government Association recently published an article about Joliet’s ambitious and controversial mayor, who plans to buy Lake Michigan water from Chicago. [Water scarcity] tensions have arrived in northeastern Illinois, which, despite its proximity to the world’s fourth-largest source of fresh water, faces a coming water crisis. Among the first battlegrounds are Chicago’s southwest…
A look back: DeKalb and its radium water
25 years ago, residents of DeKalb organized to pressure the city to reduce the amount of radium in our drinking water. The city, which already had obtained a variance that allowed it to exceed EPA limits for radium, required a second variance in 1996 to obtain permits to extend water mains for new construction. This…
Snapshot of DeKalb’s pension trends through 2020
The chart below tracks the unfunded liabilities of DeKalb’s Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund (IMRF), police (PD), and fire (FD) pensions. We expect total pension liabilities will go up with raises, cost of living adjustments, etc. However, the unfunded portions of the liabilities should not. Actuarially determined annual pension contributions are supposed to ensure they don’t…
DeKalb’s annual audit turns up deficiencies in physical security
Amid habitual deficiencies in internal financial controls, DeKalb’s move to a new city hall has created physical security risks, according to the city’s auditor for budget year 2020. During our observation of the City’s internal controls, we noted the initial entrance/front of the building has limited security and minimal restriction to the departments stationed in…
DeKalb might be doing some juggling with fire department budget
Below is the year-to-date expenditure report for fire operations for December 2020. Two things are startling about it. First you see that overtime expenses reached $1.1 million for the year, which exceeds the budget for o.t. by $688,000. Then see how DeKalb failed to make a final pension contribution of $708,000 on time, which was…
DeKalb’s Finance Division is a story of loss and low priority
DeKalb’s city council has so far failed to face the troubling results of its last annual audit. This has led to a failure to recognize the connections between those results and the turnover and staff reductions in Finance Division, including the loss of a full-time finance director. And the squeeze is still on for this…
City of DeKalb made the budget even harder to follow for 2021
Let’s say you are looking at the Fire Pension Fund in the 2021 budget. You can see the annual employer’s contribution is approaching $4.3 million. Next, you decide to look at the Fire Department budget to get a feel for how much of the total FD budget is comprised of pension contributions. The Fire budget…
Charging the Water Fund for salaries in other departments is a masterpiece of nontransparency
*Note: “Departments” as used in this article should be read as shorthand for “departments, divisions, and offices.”* Take a look at this budget from DeKalb’s Finance Division: Seems pretty straightforward, right? Well, it’s not. It does not show all the wages the Finance employees get paid. This is a budget that accounts only for the…