eighteen it's unlike the budget the kafir doesn't get a lot or we call to khafre doesn't get a lot of visibility or publicity but it's an important document for us and it really represents a big work effort on the part of our accounting staff  that starts in july and finishes today so this is an important date for us and our county staff are going to be relieved once today is done they spent a lot of time on putting this together jennifer as you can see she's smiling because she doesn't have to be over here she she was relieved  doing some of the work lynn sparks to her left is the accounting supervisor she was the primary person in putting this together along with her staff as well so we have mark's tool today he's our new accounting manager so he did step in and was able to contribute a significant amount to putting this together and leading the staff and then we have i think you met rich kikuchi he's a partner on the engagement this is their final year by the way on the contract we're gonna be doing an rfp and we've had ellison now for about seven years now so it's time for us to rotate through but i wanted just to recognize the staff jennifer for her contribution this year but also in prior years lynn and her staff and it marked what he did this year again a lot of time and effort to produce a document that manager new in role for two months so bear with me is there quite a large document to take you through so hopefully you can pull out some of the main highlights and give you a good some good formation so i'll begin with the outline of the presentation few slides in terms of the background explaining what this report is explaining some of the layout and contents that you'll find pulling out some of those key financial highlights for the fiscal year eighteen and then some of the required disclosures that the city needs to provide to explain some of those numbers and then mister samaras going to talk about reserves and particularly focusing on the general fund and then finally we'll have a partner from our current audit firm come up and give their opinion on these results as reported so the background what is the comprehensive annual financial report it's prepared in accordance with national accounting standards and it presents the financial conditions of the city as a whole and for all the individual funds consolidated report it's comprehensive because it touches on so many aspects of the performance for the city and we actually go over and above some of the requirements and have been recognized consistently from the government finance officers association for the get the same heat and light as the budget process it is a very important document in terms of representing the financial health of the city and when the city then looks to raise finance a lot of those banks and brokers will want to review the comprehensive report and just see that you know take the temperature of the city how will it be able to afford any debt repayments and the like and it also does communicate to all these stakeholders of the city council members citizens business owners employees what is the financial health of the city so it's quite a large document and it starts with an introductory section we have a letter of transmittal that's prepared by the city administrator in the finance director sets the scene in terms of the general aspects of the some notes to those statements again because sometimes you need some context to the numbers and then finally a statistical that's a mouthful a statistical section which again is unaudited which gives you know some more trend information that explains more context of one year in terms of the light of the history regards the financial highlights the report is split into a number of different sections and we review the financial performance in a number of different ways we have government wide statements  an attempt to try to show the city's performance in a similar light to you would in the private sector where you would include all of the long term liabilities and assets as well as the short term assets and liabilities and then we report on individual funds and of course the general fund is one that gets a lot of focus we do also have some information around our disaster funds and our water fund and then i wanted to pull out and share with you some changes to our self insurance fund and other post employment benefits and then i'm also in this presentation be pulling out a bit more information in terms of a couple of key disclosures one is the modified approach for city streets infrastructure of course with the recent passing of measure c and the increased ability to maintain our streets that's an important measure and then of course pension liability is something which is pretty important for most municipalities new this year from the gatsby board the government accounting standards board is statement number seventy five which requires reporting entities to establish the present value of other post employment benefits these will be things like sick leave retiring medicals other things which are outside of pensions and to calculate those through various means and quite complicated actuarial studies and to require cities to value and include it within their financial statements and performance so that was new this year and you'll see in a future slide that there was actually a prior year adjustment to bring the accounting standards into line with the new pronouncement guys be seventy five so i'll commence with the government wide statements and i've also in each of these slides where appropriate i've included a page number for the document itself you don't have to go to those pages but if you wanted to refer to them they'll obviously be more information in the report itself than will be on the slide but that's hopefully going to be a little helpful thing as we progress through the presentation so what you see before you on this slide is the total city position thousand seven hundred and eighty seven million dollars with that being the difference between the assets and the liabilities for the city and this slide breaks those two items into government activities and business type activities and so throughout the report you see these consistent terms and will explain what type of things the city does as they fit into those categories as we go fo if a breakdown of the government wide statements so this makes an attempt to break down all of the activities that the government does into the different types of activities such as administration public safety public works and what it shows as a takeaway here is that expenses far exceed the revenues for those departments because as i say they're generally supported by general taxation the performance of the government wide  state programs for this fiscal year in eighteen actually reduced its net position by two four million dollars and that's the bottom number i'll give you right here however as i mentioned before with the new gatsby pronouncement statement number seventy five that was impacted by this adjustment here seven five million which underlying meant that actually government wide activities improved its financial position in fiscal year eighteen by five million dollars but because we are now required to report other post employment benefits within the balance sheet of those activities we've report it as the net position decreasing from three  the in most cases the revenues received by these functions and programs exceeds the expenses for those programs and you can see here water for example solve revenues in fiscal year eighteen of just over fifty six million with expenses of forty five million therefore a surplus of a eleven million in terms of its operations and you can run your eye down the table and you can see that the total of all of the business type activities resulted in revenues in excess of expenditures of just under twelve million dollars there are other general revenues that have come through as well in the fiscal year resulting in a change in net position of fourteen million dollars for our business type activities so again an enhancement in the position the financial position of the city with regard its business type active if we then draw our attention to some individual funds the general fund being one of the largest funds we have in the city this slide here attempts to show you the balance sheet for the general fund and accounts for all of the short and long term assets and liabilities and i'll draw your attention to the number here on the towards the bottom right hand corner which has a total fund balance of thirty two point eight million dollars that  in essence is the difference between all of the assets within the general fund and all of the liabilities within the general fund doesn't mean that it's available cash to go and spend on things because these categorizations here within fund balance help you to understand okay  of that thirty two million fund balance how much of it really is assigned or restricted to other things and you can see that we have these categories here which are required reporting fields and the vast vast majority of this is restricted or committed how did we get there well we budgeted the general fund to have an ending fund balance of thirty two million and four thousand dollars and we ended the fiscal year with the fund balance of thirty two million eight hundred thousand dollars so we did exceed budget in terms of performance for the general fund and there are some additional points that we'll make later in the presentation where mister hsu mario will go into more details in terms of what does this mean for the general fund reserves against policy okay so this is related to that but it's not the whole picture at this stage but i'd want you to know that the general fund had a better financial performance than was budget sorry so i just wanted to point out that the mister su spoke to the the variance between budget but you could see the middle column the actual column that was you know nor the budget which is a sort of a plan how we end of the year in real terms is we had a hundred thirty three point eight million dollars of revenues but hundred thirty seven point five and costs so we ended the year with a deficit ended up consuming the overall reserves or three point seven million dollars even though from a budget perspective it looked like we did okay but in reality we did consume reserves and we'll get that's for the part where when i get into talking about reserves and the status of where we are relative to policy i'll get into some details about that but you know that's caused by thomas fire other issues with sales tax collections and things like that but it wasn't the positive year wasn't a surplus is when a few times we've actually had this magnitude of a deficit but i'll get into that more detail later okay thank you  taken to create additional funds to be able to capture and monitor some of those costs and so included within the city's position at this point in time is a negative fund position of the three disasters the january and the february storms again in its fund balance and you can see that the the water department has a fund balance of one hundred and seventy two million dollars it's a very large department in within the city and just pulling out some of the some of the key stats in here has over three hundred million dollars of assets in which the majority of it is capital assets and it does have fifty six million dollars of cash and so the water fund from a financial standpoint in terms of its position as has improved and if we look at some of the reasons why it's improved then we can see that the sales revenues have increased from prior year by six million dollars representing an increase in sales and some price increases in for some customers and within the operating expenses though they are coming in under the revenues and so that leads to a change in net position of just under thirteen million dollars so some of the expense some of the expenses came in under budget and under expectation juices some timing differences with the desalination plant there are some very large costs associated with the building and the operation of that plant and so therefore any delays in in turning the machine on would save operating costs and debt refinance and all that in debt costs and all that kind of stuff so they're kind of a one time expense saving we wouldn't expect to see ongoing  and then the impact that then has to the water fund reserves is that an improvement in the water fund reserves because excess of revenue versus expenses washes down into the reserves and so the water department is is at the end of fiscal year eighteen reporting just under forty million dollars in reserves and that will help them to tackle a lot of the backlog of capital and exceptionally high costs they have to operate the water department another of our individual fund financials as i mentioned earlier the the changes to how we now must report post employment benefits well this is shown within the city's statements within two funds when they cover slightly different things but they are attempting to value today the actuarial valued liabilities for either accidents which may occur through workers compensation or general  liability which would be shown in the self insurance trust fund or for some of the contracts we have of our employees for post employment benefits such as six leave or retiree medical and you can see that the the net result of all of this is actually that there's a negative fund balance of thirty one million dollars now that doesn't mean the city needs to write a check for thirty one million dollars in the in the short term it basically suggests that you know the liabilities  city has due to the contracts it has in place and the risk profile of operating a city of our nature with a you know streets and police and fire and everything like that the that over the course of the long term that the city may well have the need to pay an amount such as that cell and that number changes over time as actuarial studies change in assumptions change so again it's it's a number that we are required to report but a lot of it can be seen as a little theoretical because it depends on everything happening in the same way the assumptions are made over a very long period of time what that translates to is that when the actuaries come out they suggest or they tell us what we should be having in terms of monies to fund those liabilities and under gatsby rules were required to record that as a liability so you could see on that last few years which we were we thought initially we're just anomalies there are proving to be more of a trend we're hoping at some point there's sort of trail tails off but at this point we have that much in claims and we don't have as much enough assets to cover that so you can see the number of the very bottom of that column process you'll hear us talk about the need to catch up and address that deficit we're not going to run out of cash today we have enough to kind of pay the claims over the next three to five years but we're it's we're getting thin and we want to make sure we don't get further behind because it's harder to catch up so we're going to be recommending as part of the budget process additional funding toward that fund most employment benefits and we'll get into that in a moment but twenty six million dollars represents how much we're supposed to have today and in cash or other assets to pay the liabilities that are gonna be due long term it's sort of this funding model it says any point in time you should have a certain amount of money it's like building a college fund when your child is ten years old you should have a certain amount so that you're making progress toward to getting fully funded funded by the time they're they hit eighteen we are twenty six million dollars or should be and we're not nearly there but we recognize that and you'll see part of that is much more theoretical all the gay we have at that mark we'll talk about that we have no intention of ever funding mentioned that five years ago the trend was about six million per year so if in the future that does go down then that twenty six million would be adjusted to correct yeah the custom committee member freeman the number to the left of the for a long time there's nothing that's going to change that unless we decide we're no longer going to provide retirement benefits to our employees or sick leave a termination or those kinds of things some of which are vested rights some of which are not and another one as you will hear is allowing our retirees to participate in our group insurance plan with a preferred rate that's part of this term this calculation but but unless we changed what we we're providing in terms of benefits it's gonna be a number that will continue to probably grow or at least be stable over time it won't go down because it's not related to claims unlike some insurance claims okay thank you so moving on to some of the key footnote disclosures then so the modified approach for city streets infrastructure we're there's there's certain accounting standards which allow the city to not charge any depreciation and go ahead and capitalize all the streets so long as these streets are maintained to a certain objective criteria and that objective criteria is the pavement condition index and that's comparable across any any location and the city must have a pavement condition index of at least sixty to enable us to to account on that in that fashion so in essence what we would do is any money we spend on maintaining streets would just be expensed through the books an expense rather than creating assets and depreciation and all that kind of stuff and unfortunately at the end of fiscal year seventeen the pci dropped to and fifty nine and so therefore there was a challenge to the city's accounting process and we were able to say well you know there's we hope that there's gonna be some additional funding for street maintenance and and there may be a ballot measure at some point for that and and lo and behold within fiscal year eighteen measure c was passed by the voters and funds were allocated to street maintenance and delighted to say that as at the end of fiscal year eighteen the p score did increase not only from where it was but to above sixty to enable us to maintain the accounting first that wasn't the point of maintaining the streets so that we could account in a certain way it was a lovely by product and of course you know the intent is to continue to increase the investment in street maintenance with the hope that the pci will continue to increase and i've included in there a couple of numbers that you know it's a roughly fifteen million dollar annual cost to  maintain it seventy that's if you're already at seventy and so we've got a catch up some of that stuff and within that fy 's budget has allocated nineteen point seven million dollars towards street maintenance and in the past that's been far far lower which is the reason why the pci index had dropped i pulled that out and then moving on to the pensions for the city i wanted to share kind of what's changed and  for its current and current employees and future retirees as well as existing retirees and i can show that from this chart how it's changed over over the years that it's now just over a billion dollars the total pension liability for the city and  that the city has assets at a market value of just over seven hundred million which then leaves the gap as what we call the net pension liability of three hundred and thirty million dollars and the  you how that breakdown of the liability happens and so obviously pd and fire are three quarters of the liability with the miscellaneous employees twenty five percent of the liability and i just also like to point out one other thing which is that you know the market value of assets isn't stable goes up and down but the market value did actually increase in fiscal year eighteen compared to fiscal year seventeen so that helped by fifty million dollars but the liability increased by even more and one of the key reasons why the pension liability increased significantly so was the decision made by the calpers board to reduce their assumption on how much return they're going to get on their investments so the discount rate as it's called dropped to seven percent and that has a significant impact in terms of the calculation of the liability and included within the notes within the report is a sensitivity table that shows you if one percentage point of return differs and it can be tens of millions of dollars so that one assumption had the impact of over thirty million dollars increase to the liability now there are many assumptions or actually sixty eight percent now it's gone down a little bit even though the city's contributed more through pers rates and the market value of assets has increased the impact of the changes in assumptions has been greater reserve negative impact to us so the following charts kind of just break that down and i won't spend the same amount of time but i wanted to show you where we are for each of the different plans the city breaks them out miscellaneous employees are generally the administrative staff the the largest number of people  and you can see how the liability has grown over time you then have the police safety plan where again similar story and then the retirement fire plan and so the these all are subject to the same assumptions in terms of the discount rate that calpers expects to receive on its assets yet each of the plans will have a different set of assumptions in terms of the benefits do retirement and all the other come into it so good news and bad news with this long term between now and two thousand and twenty five what you'll likely see is those two bars becoming closer together i think because of the changes to the discount rate that shortfall the current unfunded liability so on the downside is that the impact is to employers and employees and how we fund that and that's going to be the challenge for a lot of a lot of cities but again the good news is that it's there in a sense they're finally making it taking actions that time we're not going to be seeing these ramp ups anymore we're gonna get there and hopefully see them drop which is good it's just getting to two thousand and twenty five is gonna be a bit of a painful process and for some studies are very painful  process then as we'd already touched on a little bit earlier about some of the other post employment benefits this is the breakdown of how that twenty six million dollar liability is is sort of made up the city does off r retiree medical benefits to employees who retire up until they become eligible for medicare at sixty five and as mister sumar eo mentioned the city also allows the retirees to of the city's medical insurance program and so the two first two numbers you see there is the the present value of that liability for offering the medical to those retirees and then also what's  implied subsidy which which in essence tries to value the fact that people who are older tend to have more expensive medical needs and therefore has an impact on the premium that the city pays for its overall insurance policy and then so those two numbers combined the the the liability of providing those benefits is just over nineteen million dollars in today's value not not a year it's just the recognition today of what that liability would be for retirement benefits so the seven million dollars that we report is today's present value of the likely costs for that within the future over a long period of time questions at this point got a few minute okay thank you thank you mister hsu mister siemer so as you know our policy requires at least for the general fund that we have two pots of money one for natural disasters at fifteen percent of the budget and so the way we calculate the number is we look at the adopted budget for fiscal year nineteen and we multiply that number the operating budget by fifteen percent if we exclude capital in that and that's the twenty million dollars and we do the same for the contingency reserve and that's to deal with more sort of economic and unexpected events thirteen point three million dollars so what we're supposed to have in reserves per our policy is thirty three point three million dollars or we always put any monies we have first to the disaster reserve that's the priority for us so that's fully funded where we see any shortfall is in the contingency reserves when we do have that and you could see it's about two three million dollars and shortfall what i want to do is give you some context to that because some of that is we find and we've learned more recently is has been created by several factors that are really timing differences that had they'd been occurred had they been realized at the time they should have last year we would not be in the same position as we are today so it gives me a little more hope to that so we start with that million two three million dollars and some of the adjustments that i think our timing differences are include the following so there were i'll start with a second one because that's the probably the most significant one well the measure c went into effect april one and so that was a first quarter through june thirty of tax revenues we got and we were well under budget we assumed five and a half million dollars in revenues just in line with what we get for a regular one percent and we ended up getting closer to four point two million dollars and we weren't sure why we thought that it was related to lack of compliance where people just forgot to modify their point of sale system is to reflect the new one percent what we've learned more recently is that along with the other one one point one knowing just below that is that the state had when they converted to a new system they ended up having problem with that automated system and they had to process the many many tax returns manually and they got very very backlogged so that they weren't able to process them on time and so for example on the the one one million dollars we got that extra extra money in late september or october we ended up gaining in addition to our regular quarterly returns or numbers we got an extra one point one for the base one percent and we also got another one point one from measure c which was again just because of lack of processing by the state it didn't have to do with with compliance they had primarily to do with the fact that the state was just behind so those had they been received in eighteen when they were due to us would have had a much bigger impact or different impact on our urine reserves so i did for me just from just to show if we were to add those back what does it look like the ninety four thousand dollars is a true up and that is the true number the two difference we want be budgeted in measures c revenues then when we transferred over general fund is sort of a temporary impact to the general fund and there mark alluded to the the mutual aid in addition to the two point something million dollars that were tracking in a separate fema fund which we always do we're capturing all the costs that we know at some point be reimbursed by fema and cal oes there were some other cost we occurred in the general fund that were not related to fema there were more related to assisting other agencies under mutual aid agreements the county for example so seven or sixty five thousand dollars were expecting to get this year but because of how we cut off our revenues and accruals we couldn't count in his last year's revenue but we will get that so another timing difference so in reality we're looking at three almost three one million dollars  reimbursements revenues or adjustments that really relate to prior year that we just couldn't recognize in the prior year because of when we got them so on a restated basis when i look at economically how did our urine how did we end the year last year we did much better than we thought in a reserves on a much better position than we thought how he measured it on a capper is gonna look differently but i just wanted to she indicate that you know we did end up better than we think that's gonna be represented in the capper which is good news so we're gonna end up with a bigger surplus this year than we anticipated to cough to offset the deficit last year silver a two year period we're gonna be okay at least for now depending all this sure does any questions on this thank you for that clarification that's okay so just before we invite the partner from lsl rich kikuchi i just wanted to echo pops mario's comments that i'm extremely grateful as the new accounting manager for the support and happy to be here so lsl has been engaged to perform a financial audit and also to assist in the preparation of your comprehensive annual financial report now we saw in a previous slide that  is a it's a requirement that you prepare one by city charter i think it's a good idea even if it wasn't required by the city charter just so you can see what the financial status of the city is you know i have a lot of friends that are not financial minded and sometimes you know it surprises me that they don't know what their financial condition is but the comp financial report is just that it gives you as the governing board just kind of a feel and an indicator of how the city finances are here at city of santa barbara and we've talked quite a bit about that so the  really is a snapshot of your financial condition at june thirty two thousand and eighteen and as your auditors we're basically here as another set of eyes working with your staff just to kind of make sure that the amounts are are materially correct and in order to do that we do a lot of testing we of account balances we we look at your controls here your processes your policies that are in place and just to give us assurance and also to give you assurance that the that the system is working correctly and that the amounts that are being reported in the in the in the kafir are materially correct so as in the past we've we've done a lot of work it's a big it's a big document as you can see and a lot of work goes into it and so we started back in in the spring time actually towards the end of may i had a team of about because about four auditors here for about a week and at that time we do a lot of planning we do lot of we talked to a lot of people in a lot of different departments we we look at we look at the documentation that we've had in prior years and make sure it's updated and make sure it's accurate we look at the controls and that's all done in order to help us plan the audit plan the tests work that were that we're going to conduct when we come back for what we call our year end audit and that took place in september and early october we were here for a couple  weeks we looked at detailed we did an analysis in detail of various accounts for instance cash and investments is a big  i'll reconcile my checkbook every every month you know i like i think everybody should do and that's the same as a city you know every month you should reconcile your your your checking account your cash and investments and so we look at that to make sure that you know everything looks accurate we actually take it a next step in and send out requests from your outside banks to make sure that the account balances  reconcile to the statements and so that's just kind of an additional type of test work that we do that's just one example we'll look at different account balances say accounts receivables or your capital assets your accounts payable making sure that the expense and the liabilities the revenues were actually recorded in their proper accounting period because the statements are june thirty eighteen statement so you know we want to make sure that if a check that was written in july maybe that pertains to the following year or maybe it pertains to june thirty eighteen so we'll do various types of tests to make sure what the goods were for the services that were rendered that's jep that's just kind of a feel as some of that tests work that we do and the result is a comprehensive annual financial report in so mister su had talked at length about that but as your auditors you hire us basically so that you can have greater assurance that the amounts that we just went through are materially correct we're basically another set of  eyes i think i talked about this last year as well but the whole concept of reasonable assurance we we do a lot of tests work we spent a lot of hours here we don't look at every transaction we don't look at every dollar but we look at you know a lot of it enough that we feel reasonably certain that the amounts in these statements are material material correct and these are amounts that you can make management decisions on you know it's going to assist you in in your budgeting process next year and so uh yeah that's that's the objective and so it all gets  distilled down to a a one page document not sure what page it's on in your cafer but it's it's our auditors opinion letter it basically says that  we've issued what's called an unmodified opinion what you got the page on page nine so all our work was done so we could issue that one page letter on page  nine the the document really is the city's document that was spearheaded and you know the team here put together we assisted but they're responsible for it but that letter is from us basically to you saying that we feel that the amounts in in this capper are materially correct if we didn't we would modify our opinion and say oh you know for instance there was just one large account balance and there was no detail for we couldn't test it so that might be a an indication that we might have to modify our opinion but we tested all the account balances we we looked at the controls and we felt comfortable with everything that's in this report so that's what you want an unmodified opinion other required communication letters there are t as in the past the sas one fifteen letter internal control letter a lot of people call it the management letter and then your auditors communication letter so like i mentioned in order to do the audit we not only look at account balances but we also need to assess the controls that are in place here at the city primarily related to funding so reporting but you know we look at the controls to help us plan the audit and help us to determine how we're going to conduct the audit however if when we're doing the audit and we saw for instance a process that we felt wasn't that there was a weakness in it that might affect financial reporting that there was an internal control in place that was not going to effectively detect errors or safeguard assets if that happened not only would it impact the way we conduct the audit but we would also need to require we would also be required to communicate that there are no reportable conditions so that basically is kind of like an unmodified opinion it's not an opinion but it means you know things look good and there's nothing came to our attention that we needed to report to you the other audit communication letter really designed as our way of communicating with you this is a great forum that i can come and speak with you and present to you and if you had any questions you could ask me but to tell you to tell you the truth not all my clients invite me to these committee these committees not all my clients have this committee and out of you know out of all in california is probably the number one firm that audits cities i'd say a third of my clients actually invite me to come and engage in this kind of a committee which is great but you know for those i don't get to meet with they will ably have at least the auditors communication letter which he also got a copy of so in there not only do we talk about you know the current significant accounting pronouncements that have been implemented this year as mister sulu had mentioned  things like that a lot of that is that talking about the new pronouncements or the pronouncements that are around the corner but if during the course of the audit for instance we had significant disagreements with management or there there were difficulties during the audit we were actually required to report that in there so you thought you would see it but uh i'm here to tell you that we didn't have that yeah which is actually even better you know when it gets to do it face to face but that's the that's the reason and the intent of the auditors communication letter so what the city of santa barbara has done in for many years is even though the kafir is required by state charter they've gotten an extra step and made sure that it qualifies for the government finance officers association award for for excellence in financial reporting so there's just a lot of t's to cross and just a lot there's a lot a lot of requirement and said we need to abide by and so for this last year we the the city obtain that award and the intent is to get that is to apply for that again and so that's kind of further assurance that you would know that the format of the financials are those prescribed by the gf away and these some cities don't do the  that just do the financial section and you won't have the statistical section or the transmittal letter but this is the prescribed format for a comprehensive financial report so that even gives you further i think comfort on that you know a job well done yeah so in summary we've been engaged ellis has been engaged to perform a financial audit and like i said it's really basically another set of eyes to to  make sure that the amounts in in this document are materially correct we've issued an unmodified opinion which is what you want the two letters are basically pretty standard and format and nothing nothing came to our attention that we felt like we needed to report to you above and beyond the standard requirements like mister so mitch and i want to use this opportunity to thank the finance department mister hsu mario and the whole staff  seven years that's went flying by but the city's been top notch you know very diligent and wanting to do things the right way been a pleasure to work with and it was another good year and th for inviting me here and i'm here to answer any questions if you might have any well thank you for coming all this way and through your kind comments about our staff and we're careful work looking over the city's finances it's important to the public and the residents to know that number one our staffs doing a great job and a transparent job and representing the financial facts of the city well and carefully and it's great and comforting to know that you have put your independent look at that as well and your team has spent time and carefully review these statements  shows that everybody on the vault in the process is very careful and and wants to achieve the highest standard of transparency that we can and that's important to the public and that's the reason for having the finance committee and the reason for meeting and talking about these things so thank you oh well thank you friedman i don't have any questions i think i was a very thorough report and you answered my few questions earlier but i i too want to echo councilmember hart's appreciation to our staff and to lsl for all you've done over the past seven years and i think the showing that this is a certified reported and the highest standards it gets into on the seriousness that we take and the planning that we put for our financials so i just want to thank everybody for having this document available for the public and it helps us as policy  makers up here to prioritize and also look at look at our own financials and how the confidence that they're correct so just want to thank everybody involved in this document it's very thorough and a lot of hours i can i can see from it so thank you or anything else you wanted to add yeah i just want to thank alice and eldritch kikuchi over the last seven years they've done a great job for us i think the value that i've at least personally have gotten from their work is that they've have done better than other firms in the past in getting into the details of how we do things in particular our internal control systems and procedures which to me are really important because for their purposes it's the wait for them to assess risk and determine how much extra work they need to do at the back end a client that has poor internal controls they're still gonna get audited it just means they're gonna spend much more time and effort at the back end to make sure that the numbers are correct for them to put their name on it but they've been able to help us tweak our procedures and aren't our controls but i think it's fair to say that our internal control systems and more importantly i think our internal control environment which starts with paul the city administrator with me and council encourages and promotes the idea of ensuring that our refine that to where we have a really good system there's no guarantee you know because we can't control all the procedures out throughout their organization but i feel really good that what we do in the finance department is is good and it ensures  reduces the likelihood of anything being going wrong but anyway i wanted to thank rich for all his work in the last seven years thank you well thank you all again for all this great work it is available to the public on the cities website now and folks can can take a look at this it's actually pretty clear and it's it's text in its explanations of all the items and it's an extremely useful document really talks deeply about the city's financial situation which is in pretty darn good shape i must say so that's really the bottom line to the public in to assist decision makers and it's real credit to you all of your work collaboratively it's great to have your perspective is from statewide perspective looking at other cities and you know taking that information applying it to our