After years of considering a deal, Tooele City has signed a contract with a Salt Lake City-based finance firm city officials hope will provide them a glimpse into the financial future.
Tooele City has entered a $52,000 contract with Lewis Young Robertson and Burningham, which will evaluate the city’s current financial situation and obligations, project the city’s future revenue, and identify viable options for paying off large expenses that may be in the city’s future.
Ideally, the plan should give city officials a set of tools for making decisions about financial commitments in the city’s future, said Tooele City Mayor Patrick Dunlavy.
“Our goal is to be prepared — to know where we stand — if we do any bonding for capital projects,” he said.
Though the city is accustomed to generating various financial plans on its own, Dunlavy said this is the first time the city has looked nearly a decade into the city’s financial future. But, he said, that is exactly what the city wanted.
“If we had future projects we wanted to do, we would know where we will be at [financially] at that time,” he said. “This is a tool — a valuable tool. We feel it’s important to plan for the future, rather than waiting for it to happen.”
Jason Burningham, the owner of the firm that will oversee the plan, said he and his consultants will focus on evaluating the city’s current financial obligations and create a five- to ten-year road map intended to help the city take a long view of what needs to be done to ensure that services remain financially sustainable in the future.
Much of the plan will look at current trends to project future revenue to help the city understand what it must do to avoid overextending.
The city comes into the beginning of the evaluation in excellent financial position, Burningham said.
“To have the cash fund balances they have, and to do the things they’ve managed to do, with such limited resources, is really remarkable,” he said.
In fact, Burningham said the city just recently received a positive review on its outstanding bonds from Standard and Poor’s, despite Standard and Poor’s longtime conservative reputation and despite the liens placed against the city in the ongoing Tooele Associate’s lawsuit.
Burningham said he already intends to include various options to pay off any judgments against Tooele City that might come out of that lawsuit in the city’s long-term plan.
Because it is such an extensive project, Burningham said he expected it would take his firm six to eight months to complete the plan. He anticipated presenting the results to the city at the beginning of next year.