2018-COH - Comprehensive Annual Financial Report

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Business -type activities. Business -type activities increased the County's net position by $167,215 versus an increase of $25,906 in the prior year. Expenses for health, education and welfare account for all of the $566,564 of expenses which represents a 1 percent decrease from the prior year. Charges for services were $503,597 and investment earnings were $5,561, which were comparable to the prior year. Operating grants and contributions increased by $92,456 (70 percent) to $224,921 as a result of the County executing a new rent subsidy contract with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. FINANCIAL ANALYSIS OF THE COUNTY'S FUNDS As noted earlier, the Countyr uses fund accounting to ensure and demonstrate compliance with finance -related legal requirements. Govemmental 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 $213.2 million, an increase of $51.7 million (32 percent) in comparison with prior year. Approximately 35 percent of this total amount ($51.4 million) constitutes unrestricted fund balance. The unrestricted portion of the fund balance is comprised of (1) $55.4 million in committed fund balance, (2) $22.9 million in assigned fund balance, and (3) $3.1 million in unassigned fund balance. The remainder of the fund balance is divided between $6.7 million in nonspendable fund balance for inventory and $125.1 million in restricted fund balance. Approximately 55 percent of the total restricted fund balance is due to restrictions relating to highways, streets and abandoned vehicles ($35.2 million) and debt service ($33.4 million). The general fund is the chief operating fund of the Countyr. At the end of the current fiscal year, unrestricted fund balance of the general fund was $37.5 million, while total fund balance increased to $61.0 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 12 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 $13.3 million during the current fiscal year as compared to a decrease of $6.1 million in the prior year. Ivey factors in this increase ($19.4 million) over last year's decrease are as follows: • A positive increase of $35.2 million (13 percent) in real property tax revenues and $4.3 million �5 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 $15.0 million (5 percent) in expenditures and of $6.1 million in transfers out to other governmental funds. $5.3 million of the total increase in expenditures is due to increases in salaries and wages from the prior year and $9.5 million in associated employee benefits. The fund balance of the County's capital projects fund increased by $26.5 million (55 percent) during the current fiscal year. The decrease is primarily due to the fact that the $35.5 million of IFIRIa