Jacob Dimond / jake@yelmonline.com
During a Yelm City Council meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 26, Stephanie Nanavich, the City of Yelm’s finance director, led a discussion on implementing a reserve fund balance policy — which ultimately was unanimously approved.
Nanavich noted that the reserve fund balance policy has been a topic of discussion within the City of Yelm for “quite awhile.” Additionally, the policy has been taken to and reviewed by Yelm’s finance committee.
“Basically, what we’re doing is we’re establishing recommended reserve levels for our major funds and then some of our special revenue funds,” Nanavich said. “What this allows is for us to weather those fluctuations that we may come across in the economy, or what have you. It is good business practice, and it’s good accounting practice for the state Auditor’s Office and the government accounting standards boards that we put our reserve policy in place.”
According to Nanavich, currently, when the City of Yelm adopts its budget, it “always” has a general fund reserve that it tries to accomplish.
“This just puts that in writing for what our goals are, not only for the general fund but also we have a cumulative reserve fund that is set aside for catastrophic type events,” she said. “We have the street fund. We have the lodging tax fund. We also have our major utility funds, water, sewer, storm water, and our internal service funds, equipment rental and information services.”
Nanavich believes the adoption of this policy will allow the city some flexibility if there are different financial obstacles during budget years, or tough financial circumstances locally or nationally. You can view all of Yelm’s budget information online at its website, https://www.ci.yelm.wa.us/departments/finance/budgets.php.
“Although we do have this policy, say we get into a budget year or the economy has gone down a little bit and we know we’re not going to meet that reserve, we would call that out in our budget ordinance,” she said. “We’d make that transparent and known that although we have this policy in place, we are not able to meet a specific reserve.”
