PRESIDIO — At Tuesday night’s meeting, the Presidio City Council celebrated another round of positive audit results. State law requires local governments to hire independent auditors, whose reports act like a credit score — without good audits, they can get turned down for grants and other opportunities.
Certified Public Accountant Preston Singleton of Singleton and Clark gave a brief presentation on his findings, which did not include any major red flags. Singleton said that this year’s audit went so smoothly that he even had time at the end of his fieldwork to visit Mexico for the first time for lunch. “This is a great audit, and you should be applauded for it,” he said.
A few years ago, not even the best tacos in Ojinaga could have won over a visiting auditor. In 2018, the city received an adverse audit after lapsing on the responsibility of soliciting and filing them since 2012. Three years later, that auditor quit, citing concern about the state of the city’s books. “In the first few years that I was mayor, nobody would touch Presidio to perform an audit,” said Mayor John Ferguson. “Now we’ve gone 180 degrees to where our staff are able to fiscally manage our city to come out with an audit that’s basically perfect.”
While the city has been making financial progress, a good audit is a reflection of the city’s financial recordkeeping — not the overall strength of the city’s economy. Singleton said that there was lots of room for growth, but that the challenges Presidio faces aren’t uncommon among other small cities. Most years, in order for the city to balance its budget, it must make large transfers from the landfill fund — in other words, the revenue from the Presidio Landfill — into the general fund, which absorbs most of the day-to-day transactions that keep the city running.
In FY24 the city took in about $2.7 million in revenues and spent $3.4 million. The difference between those two figures was once again pulled from the landfill — though a small victory was declared because the transfer was smaller than last year’s. “It’s not uncommon for cities to have their utility funds subsidize their general fund to some degree,” Singleton explained. “But your general fund is not self-sufficient, and I’m hoping you can improve that.”
In order to pass muster, expenditures must also be close to what was forecast in the city’s budget. Last year, the municipal court and the police department both went over budget, but Singleton said that’s relatively normal for certain city services. “I don’t think that was intentional, it’s just not easy projecting how the final expenditures are going to turn out by the end of the year,” he said.
