Title
Amend Ordinance S-43667 Adopting the 2017-18 Capital Funds Budget (Ordinance S-44783)
Description
An ordinance (Attachment A) amending Ordinance S-43667 adopting the 2017-2018 Capital Funds Budget to authorize reallocating appropriations among lawfully available appropriations to ensure the continued operation of the City of Phoenix in the payment of necessary expenses.
Report
Summary
This legally required amendment to the 2017-18 Capital Funds Budget will allow the City to close out the current fiscal year's budgetary accounts and proceed with the annual independent audit. This is a standard end-of-year process required to close the books.
State law precludes any expenditure not included in the budget even if additional funds become available. This means all expenditures require an appropriation. An appropriation is the formal recognition in the City's official accounting records that the City Council has approved spending authority. State law allows the City Council to transfer spending authority between line items in the adopted budget. This does not represent an actual transfer of funds, but rather, only transfers of spending authority between specific areas. As a result, the total bottom line budget amount for 2017-18 does not change.
To make sure all planned expenditures have appropriate spending authority, each year the Budget and Research Department brings to the City Council a request to amend the original budget amounts between specific areas at the end of each fiscal year. This is a normal part of the annual budget close-out process. Variances between estimated and actual expenditures that trigger the need to do these reallocated appropriations are usually caused by timing differences, such as expenditures originally planned for the early part of the 2018-19 fiscal year that actually occurred during the 2017-18 fiscal year. These timing variances can be quite large, especially when dealing with construction contracts. Allowing for these timing differences in our request for year-end budget amendments allows for bid awards and payments to vendors to proceed.
The amendments to the 2017-18 Capital Funds Budget require City Council approval to move spending authority from areas where excess authority is available to other areas where insufficient authority was originally provided due to normal changes during the year.
A $20,000 decrease in 2017-18 appropriation authority is requested in the Aviation Program's Capital Funds Budget due to the carryover of funds associated with various capital improvement projects from 2017-18 to 2018-19.
A $20,000 increase in 2017-18 appropriation authority is requested in the Phoenix Convention Center Program's Capital Funds Budget due to issuance costs paid in 2017-18 associated with the refunding of debt in 2016-17.
These are balancing measures with a net impact of $0. The total appropriation remains unchanged.
Department
Responsible Department
This item is submitted by City Manager Ed Zuercher and the Budget and Research Department.