2017-COH - Comprehensive Annual Financial Report

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versus an increase of $48,878 in the prior year. Expenses for health, education and welfare account for all of the $573,854 of expenses which represents a 5 percent increase from the prior year. Charges for services were $469,082, operating grants and contributions were $132,435 and investment earnings were $1,243, which were all comparable to the prior year, finance -related legal requirements. Governnientalfunds. 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 fiscal year. As of the end of the current fiscal year, the County's governmental funds reported combined ending fund balances of $161.5 million, a decrease of $30.4 million (16 percent) in comparison with prior year. Approximately 44 percent of this total amount ($70.4 million) constitutes unrestricted fund balance, The unrestricted portion of the fund balance is comprised of (1) $533 million in committed fund balance and (2) $17.1 million in assigned fund balance. The remainder of the fund balance is divided between $5.6 million in nonspendable fund balance for inventory and $85.5 million in restricted fund balance. Approximately 64 percent of the total restricted fund balance is due to restrictions relating to highways, streets and abandoned vehicles ($28.3 million) and debt service ($26.8 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 $27, 1 million, while total fund balance ,tecreased to $473 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 reyeresents 9 yercent *-f total, -,eneral fund e balance represents 16 percent of that same amount. year as compared to an increase of $1.7 million in the prior year. Key factors in this decrease ($7,8 million) over last year's increase are as follows: A positive increase of $17.5 million (7 percent) in real property tax revenues and $3.2 million (6 percent) in intergovernmental revenues, 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 $17.3 million (6 percent) in expenditures. $7.5 million of the total increase in expenditures is due to increases in salaries and wages from the prior year and $7,9 million in associated employee benefits. The fund balance of the County's capital projects fund decreased by $24.3 million (34 percent) during the current fiscal year. The decrease is primarily due to the fact that the $105A million of expenditures for various construction projects were only partially offset by the issuance of $8.1 million in SRF loans and $59.8 million in BANs.