As far as finances go, Nashville government couldn’t get any better.
That’s the message that Paige Sansone, a hired budget consultant, delivered to the Nashville Town Council earlier this month.
The council hired accounting firm H.J. Umbaugh & Associates to do a five-year financial plan spanning 2016 to 2022. Its purpose was to project normal revenue and expenses, as well as several capital improvement projects to see how and when they could be completed.
Nashville’s budgets, across all tax-funded and fee-funded accounts, are “excellent, better than balanced,” Sansone said.
“I don’t typically stand up and have such good news like that,” she said.
The town has “done a great job of matching disbursements with their annual receipts,” Sansone said. “You can’t ask for a better budget than that, really.”
The town also has been able to build up cash reserves that are higher than the required minimum in multiple funds.
All the capital projects the town is planning in the near future are funded in this plan, she said.
The council even has the ability to increase the town’s budget if needed within the next few years, she added. If it had a large project it had to fund, the town could issue $426,245 worth of general obligation bonds this year because its current debt is much lower than its limit.
“That would increase the overall tax rate, and I don’t think the town is interested in that right now … but you do have the statutory ability to do that,” Sansone said.
Planned projects
The 37-page report, presented to the council on Nov. 2, includes a list of 32 projects that town leaders plan to carry out over the next three years and ways that they can be funded within the current budget.
Those projects include making software, technology and vehicle upgrades; building sidewalks; doing maintenance on a parking lot, sewer lift stations, mains and pumps, manholes, water tanks and roads; adding generators on lift stations; doing security work at Town Hall; planning for the maintenance and expansion of sewers; and repairing the stormwater system on the south part of town.
The stormwater project is the most expensive on its own, at $1,220,000; in total, the projects are projected to cost $2,173,872.
There’s also a “downtown revitalization” project budgeted at $80,000, but the town has no specific project in mind, said Main Street Committee leader Brenda Young, who’s also the town’s clerk-treasurer. That’s just in the budget in case something comes up, she said.
Positive notes
The assessed value of property in town — one of the figures upon which tax collections are based — has risen by 4.5 percent, Sansone said. Because of that, the town’s tax rate is going down by about 1.5 cents per $100 of assessed property value for 2019 compared to 2018.
The town’s share of local income tax revenue is projected to go up for 2019, by about $27,000, Sansone said. “That means the economy’s doing well. There’s more people working in this county or getting better wages. That’s what’s driving that up,” she said.
Money coming into the LOIT public safety budget, funded by income tax, is projected to go up by about $9,300 next year, the report said. About $500 of it is budgeted for a software update in 2019, but the rest could go to another project, as the operating balance is projected to be above the recommended level through 2022, Sansone said.
The town’s food and beverage tax fund is one of the healthiest funds, projected to have more than $128,000 of cash in it next year. That projected cash balance rises to $176,694 in 2022. Food and beverage tax money can be spent on parking, restrooms, sidewalks and streetscape projects.
Even the water and wastewater utilities are in good shape. They hadn’t been a few years ago when the town was borrowing out of each to pay for the other.
In wastewater, Sansone was projecting that the department would have a cash balance of more than $1 million by 2022 even after factoring in capital improvement projects; in water, the projected cash balance is $543,829 by 2022 after capital improvements.
The town council had seen an earlier draft of this report that showed the water utility would be in the hole by $400,000, said council member David Rudd. A woman who came to the meeting with Sansone said that that was a mistake; a money transfer was pulled across future years that should not have been there.
“At one point we thought we were going to be broke in five years,” said council member Jane Gore.
“That makes me feel a lot better,” said Rudd.
Any of these projections can change, Sansone said. They are based on an analysis of past receipts and growth formulas from the state, she said, in response to a question from the audience. If a major shift should come from the state level that could affect revenue projections, Umbaugh would notify the council, she said.
The county commissioners also hired Umbaugh to do a financial plan for county government, but Sansone said she wasn’t personally working on that plan.
Nancy Crocker — who was elected to the town council last week — said she was surprised that Umbaugh’s outlooks were “so sunny when everybody else in the community is talking about how bad things are around here.”
Sansone said she was not privy to what people were discussing, but “I can clearly see that assessed value did go up, and the economy’s doing better because income tax projections are going up. Basing it on what we know today, the outlook does seem to be better over the next three to five years,” she said.
“That could change, but what’s so good about having a plan like this is that we can make course corrections if we need to. … All over the state we’re seeing increases in assessed value, not just here.”
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Read the entire report HERE:
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