2014-COH - Comprehensive Annual Financial Report

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The charts above illustrate the County's governmental expenses and revenues by function, and its revenues by source. As shown, public safety is the largest function in expense (43 percent), followed by general government (16 percent) and sanitation (13 percent). General revenues such as property and other taxes are not shown by program, but are effectively used to support program activities countywide. For governmental activities overall, without regard to programs, property taxes are the largest single source of funds (53 percent), followed by capital grants and contributions (15 percent) and operating grants and contributions (10 percent). Business -type activities. Business -type activities increased the County's net position by $102,154 versus an increase of $403,53 1 in the prior year. Expenses for health, education and welfare account for all of the $494,722 of expenses with very little change from the prior year. Charges for services were $468,018, operating grants and contributions were $127,119 and investment earnings were $1,739, which were all comparable to the prior year. However, other income decreased by $342,275 from the prior year due to the one-time recognition of the forgiveness of a lease payable. FINANCIAL ANALYSIS OF THE COUNTY'S FUNDS As noted earlier, the County uses fund accounting to ensure and demonstrate compliance with finance -related legal requirements. Governmental funds. The focus of the County's governmental funds is to provide information on near-term inflows, outflows, and balances of spendable resources. Such information is useful in assessing the County's financing requirements. In particular, unrestricted fund balance may serve as a useful measure of a government's net resources available for spending at the end of the fiscal year. As of the end of the current fiscal year, the County's governmental funds reported combined ending fund balances of $206.0 million, an increase of $10.7 million (5 percent) in comparison with prior year. Approximately 43 percent of this total amount ($89.5 million) constitutes unrestricted fund balance. The unrestricted portion of the fund balance is comprised of (1) $50.8 million in committed fund balance, (2) $36.9 million in assigned fund balance and (3) $1.8 million in unassigned fund balance. The remainder of the fund balance is divided between $3.8 million in nonspendable fund balance for inventory and $112.6 million in restricted fund balance. Approximately 80 percent of the total restricted Rind balance is due to restrictions relating to highways, streets and abandoned vehicles ($67.0 million) and debt service ($23.6 million). The general fund is the chief operating fund of the County. At the end of the current fiscal year, unrestricted fund balance of the general fund was $46.3 million, while total fund balance increased to $55.5 million. As a measure of the general fund's liquidity, it may be useful to compare both unrestricted fund balance and total fund balance to total fund expenditures. Unrestricted fluid balance represents 19 percent of total general fund expenditures, while total fund balance represents 23 percent of that same amount. The fund balance of the County's general fund increased by $1.6 million during the current fiscal year as compared to an increase of $5.2 million in the prior year. Key factors in this decrease ($3.6 million) over last year's increase are as follows: • A positive increase of $22.3 million (11 percent) in real property tax revenues and $1.6 million (3 percent) decrease in combined Federal and State intergovernmental revenues. As explained previously, the increase in real property tax revenues is due to a slight increase in -22-