News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
City of Cookeville in good financial shape halfway into its fiscal year.
Finance Director Brenda Imel recently gave the city council an update on its financial report. City Manager James Mills said that even with the recent moves by the Fed and dealing with inflation, the city has not seen a significant impact.
“Since stuff costs a lot more, people are paying more sales tax so our sales tax numbers have gone up quite a bit I mean they’re 10 percent more than we projected currently so we’re doing great with sales tax,” “But that additional money has to cover all the additional costs that we have that have been passed on to us.”
Mills said those additional costs include more expensive vehicles and higher-than-usual bids. Imel said all of the city utility departments are operating as predicted.
Imel said the only concern the city currently has is the expenses of employee insurance. She said in just the first half of the fiscal year, insurance claims are already at 62.5 percent of the budget.
“Typically at the end of the claims are higher than the first part of the year because they’ve hit their deductibles and they go out and they have some procedures done so we’re seeing that trend there,” Imel said. “And as of December 31st, we’ve already had four claimants that have exceeded our stop-loss deductible of $175,000. We did make significant changes to the plan effective January 1st, we increased premiums substantially, we’ve added the diabetes program, and we also added the Medicare Advantage program.”
Imel said they hope the changes will benefit the city’s reserves, but it is currently too early to tell.
