County discusses reserves policy update
By John Watson Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Wheatland County Committee of the Whole discussed a reserves policy update during the regular meeting, May 14, which outlines key changes suggested by administration.
These changes would be specifically targeted to Section 2.9 of the Corporate and Financial Services Policies.
Providing the update to the committee provided the county with an opportunity for discussion regarding the suggested changes, prior to being brought forward to a council meeting.
“We are proposing about five changes to the current reserve policy. The first change would be a recent resolution … which was put forward to investigate options around abandoned buildings,” said Joel Chiasson, manager of financial services for Wheatland County. “What we were proposing with this, or to address this reserve was, there is two solutions, or two ideas that help to solve two issues.”
One such solution being that the standard community infrastructure reserve which was amended last year was mislabeled, such that when county administration investigated some more history around that, Chiasson explained they discovered additional background information and determined the current balance of $80,000, historically derived from general tax revenue, may be a good candidate to repurpose for a new abandoned structure reserve.
Instead of creating a new reserve, the county would change the name and purpose of existing resources. It was also proposed that delegating an additional $50,000 from the operating budget towards dealing with abandoned structures would be cause for significant impact to the local problem.
“The second one is really straight forward; it has to do with the gravel reclamation reserve, and so what we had found is that the gravel reclamation reserve levy, which has been charged in prior years, it was just going to general revenue,” said Chiasson. “In the report itself, we provided a table with three or four years of total revenue received from that. It is not really material, but just for consistency, we were proposing changing the funding source allowance on this particular reserve so that we could just be more proper and send those levy reserve balances to where they should be.”
Two new reserves which were addressed via the report related to the Wheatland Wind Community Benefits Fund, and the Solar Community Benefits Fund.
Chiasson explained these were added to the report in order to ensure that funds as per the respective contracts were being tracked and balanced properly, as well as segregated aside for their respective purposes.
“The last change, which is for the policy itself, not the schedule … we just show a clause that we added in to that interest earned so we would change it to be the method of applying interest to individual restricted reserves is to prorate the interest based on the balances across all accounts, unless otherwise noted as excluded from interest for a given reserve,” he said.
A final decision regarding the changes will be decided by Wheatland County council at a later regular meeting.
The full report is available publicly via the Wheatland County Committee of the Whole meeting agenda for May 14.