Auditor presents annual Town financial status summary

The Front Royal Town Council and staff got its annual audit report prior to a November 19 work session. The Fiscal Year 2018 report from Mitchell & Associates principal Jeff Mitchell came in at 45 seconds under an hour, allowing the 7 p.m. work session to begin on schedule.

The report traced the Town’s financial assets and deficits through its General Fund covering administrative expenses and Enterprise Funds supporting its revenue-generating utilities and service departments. The message was a mixed bag of good news-bad news crossing numbers from $205-million in total assets and $45-million in cash assets to $64-million in outstanding debt and a $3-million expenditure on the $11-million cost of a new Town Police headquarters that Mitchell observed “we don’t know who that is owed to yet.”

And if confusion remains about exactly how the local Economic Development Authority has paid construction costs thus far, Town Finance Director B. J. Wilson did observe that those payments have been made “on an EDA line of credit.”

And speaking of the EDA, council adjourned to a closed session following its work session that continued a several months long discussion of “debt service related to prior and current budget years regarding the Economic Development Authority” that requires “the provision of legal advice”.

That legal advice appears to relate to the Royal Examiner’s late October revelation that the town government overpaid nearly $300,000 in debt service to the EDA over the past nine years.  Read story EDA may owe Town of Front Royal nearly $300K

Present for that closed session with the council were EDA Executive Director Jennifer McDonald, recently-installed EDA Board Chairman Gray Blanton and board member Ron Llewellyn.

And while the Royal Examiner camera was not allowed behind closed doors of THAT discussion, for those readers interested in the inner financial workings of municipal government, roll up your sleeves, pull out that abacus and view a detailed presentation of where your town stands financially as of the end of Fiscal Year 2018.

Download the Audit Review document here.

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