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Finance chief warns that compliance workload and staffing limit savings options; points to tech upgrades as mitigation
Summary
Finance Director Steve Webb told council the department is largely personnel‑driven, faces growing GASB reporting demands and that a 5% cut would be about $500,000; he advocated technology upgrades (CGI and an ERP assessment) to improve efficiency but said upgrades currently consume staff capacity.
Steve Webb, the city's finance director, outlined the finance department's performance measures, capacity pressures and likely impacts of a 5.1% reduction during the budget hearing.
Webb said finance manages a broad set of functions — payroll, treasury, income tax, audits, retirement and risk management — and underlined that much of the department's work is compliance driven and personnel intensive. He said a 5% reduction in finance is roughly equivalent to just under $500,000 and that non‑personnel flexibility is limited (the annual audit and many compliance tasks cannot be deferred).
He described ongoing work to improve payroll as a cross‑functional enterprise metric, and noted the department is upgrading legacy fiscal systems to a current cloud‑based CGI version and undertaking an ERP assessment led by the city's IT division to identify process improvements. Webb cautioned, however, that technology projects themselves demand considerable staff time and are consuming capacity in the near term.
On investments and risk management Webb recommended modest metric changes (raising facility and job‑site audits per quarter) and proposed a new retirement portfolio metric to measure manager performance against benchmarks. He also highlighted the GASB reporting load as a growing, labor‑intensive obligation.
Council members asked whether bond rating maintenance and forecasting accuracy should be performance measures; Webb said those items live in the full service catalog and that forecasting changes have already been made to the process, with early returns showing improved accuracy.
Webb summarized the trade‑offs of quality, speed and cost: with limited resources the department must prioritize among staff capacity, timely compliance and cost control. He urged council to consider technology investments that could reduce manual work while recognizing those investments temporarily increase workload during implementation.
