01/22/2004 Agenda & Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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Item No: 05 Meeting Date: January 5, 2004 Type of Business: Work Se sio Administrator Review: City of Mounds View Staff Report To: Honorable Mayor and City Council From: Charles Hansen, Finance Director Item Title/Subject: Discussion of Community Center/Recreation Operations The current discussion of the Community Center/Recreation operations began at the November 171h work session. At the request of the City Council, the Finance Department quickly put together a comparison of the current operations to the pre-YMCA, pre- Community Center operations. This quickly written comparison was incomplete and unfortunately allowed some erroneous conclusions to be drawn. The recreation program direct revenue from 1997 — 1999 was compared to Community Center room rental revenue from 2002 — 2004. These are two entirely different items. I have an expanded version of the report attached. It provides more detail of the data from the November report and adds a section for the current recreation programs. These recreation programs are accounted for on the YMCA's books rather than the City's books. The YMCA recreation programs now show up in the section titled: "YMCA Recreation Fund. They essentially run on a break-even basis of revenues verses direct program costs. This is what most recreation programs do and is what I predict City run recreation programs would do. Full-time staff who provide overall supervision are not now charged to the recreation programs and wouldn't be under a City run program either. The valid comparison is between the City Recreation Fund from 1997 through 1999 and the YMCA Recreation Fund from 2002 through 2004. There is some odd data for 1999 in the City Recreation Fund, but I wasn't able to research the story behind it. The goal of either operation would be to run these programs on basically a break-even basis. The Community Center didn't exist in the 1997— 1999 time frame, but will exist, in addition to the recreation programs going forward, regardless of whether the YMCA or the City runs the program. The current estimates for 2003 and budget for 2004 show the combined Recreation/ Community Center operation requiring a subsidy of$290,000 to $300,000 per year. Switching to a City staffed department would involve numerous choices and decisions. For many of these, we wouldn't even know the question, let alone the choice that would be made until after we are six months or a year into the new operation.