City council will have to wait until likely the end of August before it finds out what the official expenses and revenue were for the City of Moose Jaw in 2019.
The public accounts are a listing of municipal expenditures broken down by categories, such as employee and contractual expenditures. The audited financial statements provide the revenues and expenditures for the year with the overall surplus or deficit, compared to what was budgeted. City administration usually provides council with a copy about halfway through the new year and uploads a copy to the City of Moose Jaw’s website.
This year, though, the production of those statements is behind schedule and city administration is at a stalemate, finance director Brian Acker told council during the July 27 regular meeting. City hall is waiting for the financial documents from the auditors of the Downtown Facility and Field House (DFFH) Inc. so it can consolidate those numbers with the municipality’s numbers.
“Until we get those, we can’t consolidate ours,” Acker said.
Once that happens, though, city hall will be able to produce a final audited statement, he continued. This would probably happen by Aug. 24, but it all depends on when it receives the DFFH statements.
Those documents would show revenues and expenses from before Spectra Venue Management took over operations of Mosaic Place, so from January to September 2019, Acker told Coun. Brian Swanson.
Aug. 24 would be the latest that city administration has ever provided the documents to city council, said Swanson. He couldn’t understand the delay.
City administration had planned to produce the documents by May, Acker replied. But then the pandemic came along and threw off everyone’s work schedules.
The next regular council meeting is Monday, Aug. 10.
