Question on Township Building Costs and Debt Service

[johnfisher]

I guess in a nutshell I'd just like to better understand the financial situation here. Frankly, watching that taj mahal go up in Ivan road (with it's work out room etc) combined with the recent scandals have seriously degraded my trust in the governance processes around here. I have been feeling like decisions have been made in the interest of administrative staff rather than residents. I hope I'm wrong, but I'd like to understand the situation better. In that context I really appreciate your efforts to get this kind of discussion online.

Our Township has about $60 million in debt. In my estimates, about half of this debt is from funding short life assets like police cars, light trucks and equipment. In the current budget about $1M of CAPX budget was for the same. This is insane and has to stop. I was able to get the fund balance policy Ordinance passed in 2008 that required escalation of cash funding for short life assets. Currently, we will transfer about $200K of cash to CAPX but will grow at $25-50k per year – this is a step in the right direction and will force the Administration to live within their means over time.

The Township building is certainly part of the problem at $16M (Original bids were $12M) so at $16M we in my opinion over-spent. Currently our interest costs are about $40K/year per million so we can expect about $1.1M year in debt service just for the Township building over 30 years!

I will be demanding a full investigation in to the approval process of the Building because of the way it happened and the fact that cost and scale are out of sync with need.

We are in the process of appointing a Citizen’s Budget and Finance Advisory Committee (CBFAC) to look at the Township financial decisions to help the Township Administration deal with the current issues.