City books are in good shape despite downturn
By RICHARD HANNERS
Whitefish Pilot
Whitefish has hired a new finance director. Richard Knapp, the former city manager of Bluffdale, Utah, will replace Mike Eve, who retired in late December due to health reasons.
Knapp took over the city manager job at Bluffdale in October 2007. Prior to that, he served for three years as finance director and Internet technology manager for Cedar Hills, Utah.
He graduated from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s in 2001 and a master’s in public administration in 2004. He’s fluent in Mandarin and has served as a missionary in Taiwan.
Knapp was raised in Seattle and his wife was raised in Las Vegas, and both were drawn to Montana for its outdoor activities.
When he takes over March 16, Knapp will find that Whitefish’s finances are “in generally very good condition with some problem areas,” according to city manager Chuck Stearns.
“The biggest problem is in the building codes fund, as building-related permits have dropped off substantially because of the economic downturn, and reserves in that fund have evaporated,” Stearns told the council in a March 1 memo.
Stearns said he expects property tax delinquencies to increase because of the recession. He also noted that investment earnings from the general fund were down due to both lower interest rates and lower cash balances.
City court fines and forfeitures are up by $132,670 after a consultant helped deal with the backlog. At the same time, city court and contract prosecutor activity were up 50 and 53 percent respectively.
Including payoffs for Gary Marks and Mike Eve’s vacation and sick leave, paying interim city manager Dennis Taylor and hiring a consultant to find a new city manager, general fund revenues still exceeded expenditures by $187,568, Stearns reported.
Both resort tax and tax-increment financing (TIF) funds continue to accumulate for the Central Avenue reconstruction and emergency services center projects, Stearns said, but the building codes fund shows a deficit of $73,067.
Stearns said the city will submit two appropriation requests for federal stimulus money — $7.8 million for the new emergency services center and $901,000 for improvements to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
Stearns also referenced some misinformation about the city’s budget that has appeared in print. A column in the Flathead Beacon, for example, compared Kalispell’s general fund with Whitefish’s entire budget, he noted.
The column portrayed Whitefish’s budget as bloated and way out of proportion to Kalispell’s, but the general fund portion of Whitefish’s 2008-2009 budget accounts for only 12 percent of the entire budget.