Soap Lake City Council examines city budget

SOAP LAKE — Members of the Soap Lake City Council gathered Monday at the Soap Lake Senior Center for a budget workshop led by Fiscal Specialist Cheryl Brandt on correcting the city’s ongoing finance and accounting struggles.

Brandt said during the workshop that the city needs more training for its staff on dealing with the financial aspect of running a city and budgeting for the year.

“This is not something that happened with this administration,” she said. “This has been going on for several years. And what happens is when you set up something incorrectly, the next person that comes along is going to see that spreadsheet, if they don’t know any better, if they’re not trained, they’ll do exactly the same thing. That’s not their fault. It is what it is.”

The city of Soap Lake is employing Brandt to work with city employees to correct the city’s budget for the last several years. Brandt said that they cannot correct anything from 2020 or earlier, because it was audited by the state, which is something they are having to work around.

“Sitting in the chair that I’m sitting in and doing this as a career for 30 years, I want everything fixed. I want to give you a document that is 100% correct as far as I know what it is. I don’t think that’s reasonable…I think you could be caught up in a year,” said Brandt.

Brandt said that one issue with the city’s method of budgeting is that they combined their debt service, capital expenses and maintenance and operating expenses together in each individual fund, which Brandt said was not a very good way of budgeting because it makes it difficult to figure out the base cost of running individual facilities or services. Brandt said that another issue is disorganization with the city’s files, which is part of the larger issue of frequent staff turnover.

“Everybody has turnover, but when you’re this small and you’re losing people left and right, two things should happen. You should try to figure out why it's happening, and you should try to stop it,” said Brandt. “So there’s a limit to how much staff can do, especially when you’re turning over staff and they’re not even here long enough to get good training.”

Brandt provided paper copies of smaller budget reports for the council members to look over as examples while she explained several of the basics of how to read the reports and pointed out certain errors that needed to be corrected.

“What I’d like you to start incorporating into your budget meetings, and really have a discussion about is, and we talked about this at the last meeting, needs versus wants,” said Brandt. “Council needs to be able to say ‘We’re not going to do that right now’...That doesn’t mean you can’t spend any money. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is you need to really be selective about what you’re going to be doing for the next year or two.”

The council discussed several avenues that might help them work better with the city’s finances, such as attending financial conferences, taking online training courses, and meeting for budget workshops more frequently.

“The one thing that I hope that you take away from this,” said Brandt, “that to me is really important, is not necessarily that you understand all of this but that you understand that we’re working on it. We want to give you a budget document…that is a lot cleaner and better to understand, and that when you make a decision to spend capital money for either a project or something, you know that decision is a sound decision because you know the money’s there. That’s my goal.”

Brandt recommended several specific training manuals and budgeting systems that might aid the city in keeping better track of finances and said that she will continue to work with the city in the near future to correct the budget and get into a more reliable and stable position.

“The city’s not broke yet…what the consultant said, what the SAO said, was you’re going down and your cash reserves are going down. You’re not broke,” said Brandt.

Gabriel Davis may be reached at gdavis@columbiabasinherald.com. Download the Columbia Basin Herald app on iOS and Android.