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Item No. 9F Meeting Date: May 9, 2005 Type of Business: Council Business Administrator Review: _______ City of Mounds View Staff Report To: Honorable Mayor and City Council From: Charles Hansen, Finance Director Item Title/Subject: Resolution 6511 Approving Agreements with Ehlers & Associates and Springsted, Inc. for Financial Services During the Year 2005 The City uses outside financial consultants for various services during the year. These include auditing, bond sales, assistance with proposed TIF developments, continuing disclosure for past bond sales, and TIF reporting. There are several justifications for these services. In the case of auditing, there is a legal requirement that an outside CPA audit the city’s financial records. In bond sales, the financial advisor provides access to and knowledge of the bond market that staff could not duplicate. For several of these services, a consultant’s personnel develop expertise due to their exclusive work in a particular field. City staff must generalize over a range of disciplines. Other times, the consultant helps meet a peak workload issue that the City doesn’t maintain sufficient staff to handle. Ehlers & Associates for TIF Reporting: Ehlers prepared the City’s TIF reports for the years 2000 and 2001. This corrected a problem that the report for 2000 had been filed with errors and helped to get the 2001 report filed on time. The City purchased specialized TIF reporting software from Ehlers and I filed the reports for 2002 and 2003. The cost of filing the 2001 report was $975 to Ehlers plus about ten hours of my time to provide data for the reports and to copy and mail the final reports. The cost for the 2003 report was $266.25 for the software and about thirty hours of my time to prepare and file the reports. The TIF reports are due on August 1st of each year, which is about the worst possible time for interfering with the city’s budget preparations. I had intended to ask the City Council to authorize having Ehlers prepare the TIF reports even before it was determined that I will leave the City. I feel that Ehlers services are well worth their incremental costs when compared to the value of freeing up twenty hours of my time to stay on task with the budget.