Category: City & County Politics

By Anton Riecher
A host of new capital projects drove down the amount of cash on hand at the end of the 2023-2024 fiscal year by a small amount, according to the 2023-2024 municipal audit presented to the Lytle City Council Monday night.
The audit, prepared by Armstrong, Vaughn and Associates, was presented to the council by auditor Jacob Twomay.
“You did have less cash at the end of the current fiscal year,” Twomay said. “This is because you spent a lot of money on a lot of new capital projects that you’ve been working on. I’m sure you’ve seen the construction going on throughout town.”
The decrease in available cash amounted to $36,000 from the previous fiscal year, “not a very large decrease in terms of what you have on the books, but it was still a decrease,” he said.
Despite the decrease, the city continues to show growth in sales tax and property tax revenue, Twomay added.
“There’s been a lot of expansion here along the highway (Interstate 35) with new businesses and new buildings coming in,” he said. “That helped increase your sales tax and has been a great boom.”
However, the audit shows that the city’s expenses increased as well, Twomay said.
“The main thing I would note was your professional fees grew in the past year along with your salaries and wages,” he said.
Those increases are to be expected with the effort to retain the talent on the city staff, Twomay said.
“You’ve got to incentivize them to stay,” he said.
Twomay also noted that the increase in property taxes, while healthy, was not as much as had been expected.
“You were actually over budget in revenue overall, especially because of your sales tax, which was over budget by $232,000,” he said.
Mayor Ruben Gonzalez, who works as Medina County veterans services officer, asked if the expected increases failed to take into account tax exemptions for disabled veterans moving into the area. Twomay said that was possible.
“Depending on how the freeze works, over age 65 and disabled veterans, those freezes will kind of keep your tax value down, which keeps your revenue from increasing as much as you would probably expect, or as much as the market would say,” he said.
As is standard procedure in many communities, the council elected earlier this year to bring in a new auditing firm after a five-year stint with Armstrong, Vaughn & Associates. Gonzalez noted that the auditors had worked closely with city staff to bring financial bookkeeping up to date.
The books were as much as three years behind at one point before the auditing firm came on board, city finance director LaNet Hester said.
One area that Twoney noted that still needs work is the number of bank accounts main…LOGIN TO CONTINUE READING at www.devinewsmembers.com. You will get INSTANT online access to our full E-edition, and begin getting the newspaper delivered to your home next week for $36 a year in Medina County. Support important local city, county, and school news like this!