Inside Arvada

Inside Arvada's Budget with Finance Director Bryan Archer

• City of Arvada • Season 1 • Episode 15

Share episode

Send us a text

Finance Director Bryan Archer joins us to talk about the City budget, taxes, bond projects and more. Bryan has been with the City of Arvada since 1996, serving several roles, including budget analyst, accounting manager and controller. In his role as Finance Director, Bryan oversees all areas of finance, including treasury, budget, cash, investments, accounting and purchasing.

Topics covered in this episode include: 

Other news and events: 


Visit us at ArvadaCO.gov/Podcast or email us at podcast@arvada.org.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Inside Arvada, the City of Arvada's podcast, where we bring you conversations with the people who make Arvada a thriving community. Hear stories about the past, present and future of Arvada through the lens of the city team members who help make it all happen. Explore the complex topics impacting our community, from the roads you drive to the water you drink, the parks where you play to what your neighbors think. Join us as we take you Inside Arvada.

Speaker 2:

Hello and welcome to Inside. Ar 1996 and became the director of finance in January of 2014. In his time with the city, he's served several roles, including budget analyst, accounting manager and controller. He oversees all areas of finance, including treasury, budget, cash, investments, accounting and purchasing. He pretty much does it all. Prior to his time with the city, archer worked in public accounting and grew up in the Denver metro area, and, as we learned, he or, as we know, katie and I are both CSU Rams, and so it's always fun spending time with a fellow Ram. Brian is just such an asset for the city, and so it's so fun to sit down and talk with him and learn from him, and, as always, I'm joined by my co-host, katie Patterson.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, it's great to talk to Brian Go Rams we are all CSC Rams, which is pretty fun. He just has such a wealth of information about the city, both because he's just been here for a long time and, as we get into the city's finances, touch literally every single thing that we do, and so he oversees all of that and it's just really a huge role and really important for all of us who work at the city and all of you who live, work or just enjoy coming to Arvada. And one thing he talks about is the general fund versus the enterprise fund, and we do a pretty good job in the while we talk to him talking about the enterprise fund. But I just wanted to explain again the general fund is everything else, and so if it doesn't come from the enterprise fund, which is water, wastewater, stormwater, solid waste and golf, it comes from the general fund. So that's street maintenance, snow plowing facilities, PD, police department, everything. So, yeah, just wanted to clarify that. Anyways, off my soapbox, let's get into the episode.

Speaker 2:

Hi Brian. Thanks so much for joining us for today's episode. Let's begin by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do for the city.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thank you for having me. Well, I've been with the city a long time. Currently I'm the finance director. I actually started way back in 1996. I was hired in to the food and golf courses as their budget analyst, spent some time working in that operation, ultimately had the opportunity to implement Oracle Financials, which, if you're following along, we just replaced, so that makes me feel very old. I then moved over to the finance department, was an accountant, then an accounting manager, the controller, and then, 10 years ago, into the role I am now. Done it all Well, at least tried everything.

Speaker 1:

A little bit of everything yeah. So, to start off, can you explain a little bit the different types of funding sources that we have as a city?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. The city has many different funding sources, but I like to boil them down into two major categories. So the first category I would like to talk about are what I would call taxes, and this supports our operations, our general fund, and the taxes that you are familiar with would be sales tax and property tax, and ultimately the general fund gets the majority of its revenue from sales tax. We charge 3.46 in our sales tax. 3% goes to the general fund, 0.46 goes to our police operations. Of that, 3%, of that 3%, 20% of that number goes to support our capital projects. This is either items related to capital or debt that supports that capital.

Speaker 1:

So really, 80% to operations, 20% of that sales tax to capital, and a capital project is something like a bond project. Right, these big projects that we take on as a city.

Speaker 3:

That's correct. It could be a large project like 72nd Avenue or Ralston Road or the new Arvada Aquatic Center. It could also be a smaller project like maybe a park or a road improvement. Thanks.

Speaker 1:

And then how does that sales tax number compare to other municipalities in the area?

Speaker 3:

Marvada is really in the middle. So if you look around our bordering cities, we're a little bit above Lakewood and Golden, a little bit below Westminster and then ultimately, we're significantly below Denver.

Speaker 1:

Okay, nice. So you mentioned general fund, and then we also have enterprise fund. What's in those?

Speaker 3:

So under our enterprise funds we have five of them at the city. We have the water fund, the wastewater fund, the stormwater fund, the solid waste fund and the golf courses and that's our area that we charge fees for those operations. Those funds receive very limited support from the general fund. In fact, they have to get less than 10% support to be considered an enterprise fund and the majority of them receive no support from the general fund at all.

Speaker 1:

Nice.

Speaker 2:

And so those are almost like businesses in itself, and so they operate much differently than anything out of the general fund. I'm most familiar with golf courses. I believe you began with the city working with the golf courses, so that approach those enterprise funds operate much differently than something that's.

Speaker 3:

They're modeled exactly like a business that they have to charge fees to support everything that they do, and that again includes their operations in their capital.

Speaker 2:

I'm curious also to learn more. Like Katie touched on the bond funding. We've got the two big road bond projects. I'm curious also to learn more. Like Katie touched on the bond funding, you know we've got the two big road bond projects I'm familiar with. Like I think my grandma gave me some bonds as a kid and I had to wait like 30 years.

Speaker 3:

It's a little different.

Speaker 2:

What are these bonds Like? How is that? How do we get that funding for these huge, massive projects?

Speaker 3:

It depends on the type of bond funding that we're going for. The majority of bond funds require a vote of our citizens and they're usually sales tax related, and so we ask our citizens can we borrow money for a period of time most likely 20 years and then use those funds to do a major project and then pay them back? But they do require a vote. There are other ways to generate. They're like bonds, they're called COPs, so they generate funding for the future. These are more like mortgages, so we would mortgage like city hall and that requires a vote of our council. But we don't do those very often.

Speaker 2:

So, even though we had the bonds for the road projects, go to vote correct, that's correct. It wasn't a vote for an extra tax, it was just a vote for. Hey, should we borrow this money to pay?

Speaker 3:

for these projects. That's correct. So the bond funds we used most recently were just using dollars we already had and we would apply them to then pay that bond in the future, and so, no, there was no increases in those Gotcha.

Speaker 1:

But then the I don't know if it's a water or wastewater bond that works a little differently, because it's an enterprise fund.

Speaker 3:

Correct. So those are more revenue-based and they'll be based upon the fees that you're going to charge. Usually, when you borrow money in an enterprise fund, you do have a revenue component tied to it. So you might say, hey, we want to borrow money in an enterprise fund. You do have a revenue component tied to it. So you might say, hey, we want to borrow money for 20 or 30 years and we're going to need to increase fees let's say 5% a year for the next 10 years to pay that back. And so they usually go hand in hand.

Speaker 1:

Got it and yeah, there's a lot of for my side of things, I know more about the water, wastewater, stormwater, stuff that's going on. But we have a lot of aging infrastructure that needs a lot of work and so those bonds are helping to pay for that work to repair, replace, maintain our critical water, sewer and stormwater infrastructure.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. A lot of that was put in in the 60s and 70s when Arvada was really growing up, including things like our treatment facility, our sewer lines, and they have a 50-year life and if you do the math, we're at that life.

Speaker 2:

And so we really need to reinvest in our community to make sure the next 50 years operated like the last 50.

Speaker 3:

We wanted to have you on specifically this time of year in.

Speaker 2:

October. I mean you're welcome any time of the year, but it's a kind of critical point in the budget season calendar. Help us understand a little bit about the annual budgeting process the city does, as well as kind of the more long-term tenure model which it sounds like you helped create and implement.

Speaker 3:

I did so. We'll talk about that here in just a minute. The city does an annual budget, really what we call a biannual budget. We really prepare a two-year budget but it's approved each year by our city council. That's required. The budget process starts in January and goes year-round.

Speaker 3:

We take input from our citizens. We look at our city council's take input from our citizens. We look at our city council's strategic plan. We look at historic financial data, future trends etc. That helps us create our two-year budget. Our departments prepare that information, bring it to a budget committee. We then evaluate all those items. The city manager he or she decides what they're going to do and how they're going to present that to city council and then ultimately, the city council will approve or deny the budget in October. How it works in conjunction with our tenure plan is the tenure plan is a long-term financial look at the city, and the reason we have a tenure financial plan is it certainly makes us more conservative, but it also makes sure that anything we put in the two-year budget we can pay for not only in the two-year but throughout the 10-year.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, very strategic. It makes a lot of sense. I probably need to do more two and 10 year budgeting for my own home's budget, but that's a separate topic.

Speaker 1:

And I think we're going to talk about this more later but part of why we can do a 10 year budget model is because we're TABOR exempt. Is that correct?

Speaker 3:

That is correct. So way back in 1996, the citizens of Arvada voted to get out of TABOR. So we are allowed to retain any amount of revenue that's above our budget, where places like the state of Colorado, jefferson County, if they have more revenue than their budget plus inflation, they have to return it to the taxpayers. That's very beneficial to us because it enables us to ride out the highs and lows, really to blur that budget cycle throughout 10 years. So, for example, when we went through COVID just a few years ago, we were fortunate enough as a city to not have to lay anybody off. We didn't have to put anybody on furloughs. We were able to keep offering the tremendous services that we offer because we were able to push out those losses throughout our 10 years and recoup them in the future years.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's really good information I never would have thought of. Okay, you kind of mentioned also in the budgeting process that the community can get involved. Yes, what does that look like?

Speaker 3:

So we have a community survey that we send out each and every year that we ask some financial information from them. There will also be a public hearing coming up I think October the 21st this year that we ask if the community has any input that they would like to provide to city council that they can go ahead and come and talk to us about the budget. We're also open throughout the year. Finance takes any and all comments. We're happy to meet with you and ultimately, can reach out to your council member at any time.

Speaker 1:

Nice and we'll link some information about how to attend city council meetings and all of that in the show notes, as we do each episode and all of that in the show notes, as we do each episode.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I wanted to highlight some of the recognition that you and your staff have received over the past year, but really the past four decades. Each year you get recognized for your work that you do and it's all related to financial transparency, right, Absolutely Making all this complicated numbers and budget and decisions. It's all available on our website public knowledge. You can go in. You can look line by line at each department, at what they're spending money on and whatnot, and tell us a little bit about the effort that goes into making all this information public and some of those awards that we've received.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, thank you. So the awards that you're speaking about are through the GFOA or Government Finance Officers Association. They are two areas that we're really proud of. One of them is our Achievement of Excellence in Financial Reporting. This is our annual report, so this shows you how we spent the dollars that were allocated to us from the prior year, and there's a lot of effort that goes into that.

Speaker 3:

Obviously, we have over 25 different funds, many different requirements for transparency. Like you said, the city manages over a $300 million investment portfolio. There's a ton of disclosure requirements related, and we also have to go through an external audit, and that audit feels like it goes year round, but it is very in-depth. Feels like it goes year round, but it is very in-depth Really. What they're trying to say is what you hit on earlier, which was transparency. We're trying to just demonstrate to everybody this is what we're doing. And the other one we're proud of is on the budget side, and that's the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award. We apply for that every other year because we have a biannual budget, and that really says more than just the numbers. It says that the budget has to be a policy document, an operations guide, obviously a financial plan and then a communications device, as you all have helped us with that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you do such a great job when you do those presentations to council of making a lot of this complex information very digestible for the average resident, so I would encourage those listening. If you're curious to learn more, tune into the City Council budget presentation coming up here pretty soon and you make it very easy to follow and understand, even though it's a lot of complicated information. Thank you, I appreciate that.

Speaker 1:

And so, before we let you go, we always like to give our guests the opportunity to either debunk or clarify any misconceptions that you might hear sometimes from the community, or just a space to say what else should people know about our city finances or city budget?

Speaker 3:

I think when you asked me earlier about the revenues for the general fund, I think I failed to talk about property tax, and so that's one of the things I'd like to clean up. So most people know about property tax. You pay a lot of money in property tax. The city does not receive a lot in property tax. The majority of that goes to the school district and to the county. From a city's perspective, we get 4.31 mils in property tax For the average Arvada resident. You pay about 90 mils, so really 5% or so of your property tax bill comes to us, and if we put numbers to that, the average home is about, let's say, $600,000, $650,000. And Arvada would get somewhere between $150,000 and $175,000 of your property tax bill. Now certainly we have metro districts. I can hear the people out in Candelas and Lydon Rock saying wait a minute, I pay more than that and that is a funding source in and of themselves again, where you help offset the infrastructure that went into that metro district.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's something we can link to in the show notes. If you go to the Jeffco property search, you just plug in your address, your name, you'll pull up your house and then you can look line by line where all your mills and taxes are going to.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. And then I think, the other couple of things that I would throw out there. I think you all have talked about this before, but fire is not a part of the city, it's its own special district, along with Apex, which is also its own special district. So we're a little bit unique from that perspective. What about the schools? The Schools are their own beast. We have nothing to do with the schools.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's funny that those are really common misconceptions, though I think that I even was just talking about property tax this weekend.

Speaker 2:

I'm sorry, I'm educating somebody now.

Speaker 1:

It's great that I learned this stuff from you, because now I can pass it along to more people too.

Speaker 3:

Thank you for doing that.

Speaker 1:

Just doing my daily service of educating people about where their taxes go. I can't say I can do a whole lot of that, but I knew that one.

Speaker 2:

Sounds like you had a fun weekend yeah.

Speaker 1:

Well, I don't know.

Speaker 2:

Super easy round of quick questions to get to know you better, beginning with what is your favorite thing about Arvada.

Speaker 3:

Well, other than my wife is originally from Arvada. We live 20 blocks from where she grew up, so you know she likes to say she didn't fall very far and obviously my two daughters were born here as well. My fun fact would be my great-grandfather's farm was located at 63rd and Tennyson. My great-grandfather's farm was located at 63rd and Tennyson, so back in 1930, he bought a farm there and he used to drive his truck back and forth to Denver with produce from Arvada because it was such fertile soil and my grandfather was born and raised there.

Speaker 3:

Wow, very cool. Yeah, did he grow celery? They grew celery, they grew everything. How about that Pretty?

Speaker 2:

wild. All right. Next question what is your first, last or best concert? Could be all three. Could be just one.

Speaker 3:

Geez. First, last or best. My first concert was the Beach Boys at Fiddler, so that shows you how old I am. It's hard to pick a best. I think some of the funnest ones I've been to. I saw Taylor Swift's first concert at Cheyenne Frontier Days. She was 15 or 16. Just a young girl honestly, up there playing. I got to see George Strait a bunch of times, even got to see him acoustical, so that was really fun. Garth Brooks before he was big at the Grizzly Rose you can tell I'm kind of a country fan, so any of those.

Speaker 2:

Very cool. Seems like you know how to spot those big names before they come here.

Speaker 3:

Oh, I've seen a lot of really bad ones there too, Ones we don't remember.

Speaker 2:

You touched on a little bit but what brought you to Arvada and to work for the city?

Speaker 3:

Well, we already talked about my wife a little bit. She wanted to live close here. I actually was born and raised in Applewood, right over here by Applejack, so I didn't go very far either. But so I didn't go very far either, but ultimately it was the job I was tired of working as a CPA, that's where I started my career Long hours People don't like you very much, and so having the opportunity to come work in an industry food and golf that I really enjoyed. I was an outdoorsy type of a person. I like golf a lot Really excited me and once I was here I was hooked. I love the service mindset and lot really excited me, and once I was here I was hooked.

Speaker 2:

I love the service mindset and I've really enjoyed my time. And then, going back before you were CPA, what was your first job?

Speaker 3:

Well, I grew up in construction so honestly we were working when we were about 12 or 13 years old, but I'm not sure I ever got paid. I think my dad and grandpa used to said if we worked really hard they'd buy a slurpee at 7-Eleven. That was like amazing for us. But my first real job was I was a lifeguard at Surfside Pool in Lakewood, which was located at 9th and Sheridan, so it was a pretty fun job. Ultimately, to be 16 and be all day long at the pool was kind of a neat thing, nice.

Speaker 2:

And then, finally, what's your favorite project? You've done with the city and you've been here, like as we mentioned at the top since 1996, you've got a lot to choose from, and you've done some really important projects too.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. I. I've been a part of so many super fun projects it's hard to list them. Yeah, uh, I mean the Arvada Center expansion, westwoods Golf Course expansion, the new Westwoods Golf Clubhouse, lake Arbor Clubhouse. Most recently, the Arvada Aquatic Center, I think. But since I'm a finance dork, I got to go with the finance route. My favorite project was probably creation of the tenure model. So when Mark Devon came to work here, he wanted a long-term financial plan put together. He kind of threw it out at us and we said we can do that. So we took it and we created the first 10-year plan for the general fund. And then Parks was next and we kind of sold it to city council. They didn't like it. So we came back the next year and did it again and they said okay, we'll go with you. And we've been doing it ever since. So that was probably 11 years ago, 12 years ago, something like that, and just really proud that we're still using it and, you know, really proud of what it's enabled the city to do.

Speaker 2:

Very cool to be able to see that get enacted and carry on much long after you completed that project. Yeah, the action's got to be really cool, yeah.

Speaker 3:

No, I appreciate it.

Speaker 2:

Well, awesome, thanks project and see it in action, it's got to be really cool. So, yeah, no, I appreciate it. Well, awesome, thanks, brian, so much.

Speaker 3:

I know I learned a lot. Hopefully our listeners did too.

Speaker 2:

We appreciate you coming on our podcast, you know. Thank you very much. This has been fun. All right, before we let you go, I want to close out with our news and events segment. As a reminder, you can stay in touch with us by texting us there's a link at the top of each episode on whichever podcast platform you're listening on or you can email us at podcastarvadaorg. We love hearing from our listeners some feedback about what you enjoy or what you'd like to maybe see different, maybe even some episode ideas and more.

Speaker 2:

And recently we got an email from a listener, greta, who asked about the city's GIS team. Gis stands for Geographic Information System. Essentially, it's just a very sophisticated mapping tool that a lot of governments, such as Arvada, use to share and display information. And so Greta's just wondering are we going to have our GIS team on the show, which, a is a great idea, and B kind of how the city uses GIS data to help throughout different departments in the city. And sure enough, our city's GIS team does use that data in a lot of different ways to make our work more efficient and more strategic. Just a few of the examples we have is 1,200 miles plus of utility network data mapped out. We've got 150,000 specific locations on city infrastructure assets mapped out. We have about 100 GIS web services used to create more than 700 individual web map products to support all aspects of city service delivery.

Speaker 2:

Some of the current projects that our GIS team is doing include making those maps more digitally accessible and ADA compliant. They're also working on a fiber network management map, some emergency operations, so really they're touching all sort of divisions and assets and services throughout the city and so we can link to the publicly available GIS maps in our show notes. So thank you for that question, greta. We really appreciate it. And now for our news and notes segment. We have, as we mentioned in the interview with Brian, our annual community survey is open. So you can take that survey by going to arvadacogov and it's on the homepage there, or we'll also link that to our show notes. The survey is super important for us to gather information from our community and to help make better informed decisions. And then, katie, I know you've got a couple other items as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so also coming up here soon, keep an eye out for the Cities Connecting Arvada transportation system plan. There's going to be a second round of community engagement and so what that plan is is really looking at comprehensively planning for the next 20 plus years of transportation opportunities and improvements for the city, and so that is really a wide range of types of things, everything from bike lanes to public transit to, you know, your regular single passenger roadway. Keep an eye out for that. The community engagement on kind of the final product essentially will be open here toward the end of October and then coming up starting November 2nd is the annual Leaf Recycling Drop-Off event that takes place at Stinger Sports Complex. It starts November 2nd and runs through November 16th and the drop-off is open Monday through Saturdays, 9 am to 2 pm. They are closed on Sundays and then, just as a reminder, saturdays often are the busiest, but the event is open to all Arvada residents.

Speaker 1:

Just be prepared to show proof of residency. And then for this event you do have to empty your leaf bags into leaf piles so that the leaves can be recycled. Even if you use compostable bags, they still need to be dumped out of those bags and the entrance this year is a little bit of a change. It's gonna be off of 58th Avenue and then you'll exit onto Oak Street, and so they'll have lots of signage in place and folks helping to direct traffic. But there's also a map on our website, so we'll link to that information. And then, sean, you've got one final item.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, as we mentioned last episode, our Climate Action and Sustainability Plan open house is Thursday, november 14th at the Arvada Library. They're in Old Town. It's an open house style community meeting where you can take a look at the draft of the plan and provide feedback before it goes to council in December for possible adoption, and so we'll link that community meeting in our show notes. Thank you so much to our guest today, brian Archer. Be sure to watch or actually listen to our next episode with Hillary Romzenberger from the Apex Park and Recreation District, and we'll have Hillary on to talk about the new Arvada Aquatic Center. That'll be a fun one, as always.

Speaker 2:

You can stay in touch with the podcast by visiting our website at arvadacogov slash podcast. You can also be sure to subscribe and rate and review the show and reach out to us at podcast atarvadaorg. Today's podcast was recorded and edited by Arvada Media Services producer, james Long, and I'll leave you with this fun fact budget related, about a third of the city's annual revenue comes from sales tax. That means when you shop here, local in Arvada you're supporting the many city services that our teams provide.

Speaker 3:

Whoa.