Author Archive
What Can Fire Fighters Teach Police Officers?
One of the advantages of seniority is that you can see how local government has changed over the years. One of the dramatic changes that I have witnessed in many California cities is the transition of the fire profession from the one-horse function of suppression to the full-team of fire/life safety. Many fire departments now [...]
The Downside of Water Conservation
This discussion is for the end-user water supplier that is not subsidized with tax dollars. You are about to start a dance that may take years to fully play-out. The act of raising water rates to discourage consumption or to compensate for higher State water rates will inevitably lead to a decline in water consumed. [...]
Ensuring Utilities Pay Their Way
In the early 1980s, we pioneered the use of the Franchise Fee as a fee for the use of a city’s rights-of-way by the municipal utilities. Our insistence on the franchise fee as a fee and not a tax flew in the face of conventional wisdom at the time, which considered it a tax. Our [...]
City Report: Riverside, CA
This article was written by Barbara Steckel, former finance director
and treasurer for the city of Riverside, California. At the time of writing, Riverside had
just received the initial draft of a report prepared under contract by Revenue & Cost Specialists, L.L.C.
The scope of the report was to analyze the cost of fee-chargeable services and recommend changes
in fees and charges to better reflect those costs.
Prioritizing Your Budget – Part II
Last month’s newsletter ended with the question whether programs with their own funding source should be treated differently in the prioritization process. The best answer to that question is Yes and No.
Long-Range Financial Plans
I got a call recently from a California city interested in consultants that did long-range financial plans (LRFP). I couldn’t remember the last time I had a similar call even though LRFPs had once been the rage. I mumbled something about how our approach was completely different than the historical LRFP process and left it [...]
Available versus Billable Hours
It is important to know the available hours of our employees, so that we can spread their total cost over these hours. Consequently, the example went on to divide the total dollar cost of our fictitious employee by the above available working hours for a resulting fully-burdened hourly rate. Putting this exercise in context, the [...]
What type of CAP should I use?
The A-87 CAP was created because our profession (Municipal Finance Officers Association, at the time) wanted overhead reimbursement on Federal Grant programs which we knew cost us (Finance Directors) additional work. The result was the proverbial “half a loaf” as we were allowed to charge general overhead but not costs related to the legislative function [...]
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