Comprehensive Annual Financial Report 2016

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Business -type activities. Business -type activities increased the County's net position by $48,878 versus an increase of $6,432 in the prior year. Expenses for health, education and welfare account for all of the $544,808 of expenses which represents a 3 percent decrease from the prior year. Charges for services were $457,842, operating grants and contributions were $133,932 and investment earnings were $1,912, which were all comparable to the prior year. 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 $191.8 million, an increase of $3l .3 million (19 percent) in comparison with prior year. Approximately 44 percent of this total amount ($84.3 million) constitutes unrestricted find balance. The unrestricted portion of the fund balance is comprised of (1) $54.8 million in committed fiend balance, and (2) $29.5 million in assigned fund balance. The remainder of the fiend balance is divided between $5.8 million in nonspendable fiord balance for inventory and $101.8 million in restricted fund balance. Approximately 66 percent of the total restricted fund balance is due to restrictions relating to highways, streets and abandoned vehicles ($43.4 million) and debt service ($23.5 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 find was $39.1 million, while total fund balance increased to $53.9 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 fund balance represents 14 percent of total general fund expenditures, while total fund balance represents 20 percent of that same amount. The fund balance of the County's general fund increased by $1.7 million during the current fiscal year as compared to a decrease of $3.4 million in the prior year. Key factors in this increase ($5.1 million) over last year's decrease are as follows: • A positive increase of $12.9 million (5 percent) in real property tax revenues, which was offset by decreases in almost all other revenue categories. As explained previously, the increase in real property tax revenues is due to a slight increase in the value of net taxable real property as evidenced in the accompanying statistical tables. • The positive impact of the increase in revenues was offset by increases of $11.1 million (4 percent) in expenditures. $6.5 million of the total increase in expenditures is due to increases in salaries and wages from the prior year and $9.0 million in associated employee benefits. The fund balance of the County's capital projects fund increased by $28.9 million (69 percent) during the current fiscal year. The increase is primarily due to the issuance of approximately $130.1 million in bonds that were recognized as an other financing source, and of which $35.0 million was used to pay bond anticipation notes (BANs) that were issued in the prior year and recognized as a current liability because the legal steps regarding the issuance of the bonds to pay -20-