 It's 511. I will call to order the Board of Finance on January 17th. I apologize, we're getting started a couple of months late. We'll jump right into the agenda. We do, it would be helpful if Council would move the agenda with the removal of 3.04 as is noted on board docs because it needs more work. So moved. Seconded by Councilor McGee. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. We have an agenda that brings us to the public forum. I'm not seeing any member of the public here in person to speak to the Board of Finance. Is there anyone online? Okay. Sharon, we see your raised hand and your mic is being enabled and hopefully you can go ahead and speak now. Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. I don't have the agenda in front of me so I don't know what was removed. Is that the TIFT item? No, it's the reclassification item. Okay, so thank you. So I'm here this evening to, I wanted to speak about the TIFT and the monies that will flow from the TIFT to the city coffers and two different separate timelines of $750,000. That's clear. And then there was a table at the bottom which if I interpreted correctly, tells me that you have some decisions to make. You can decide for the first $750,000 which becomes available I think this year or soon. You could start paying back the deficit and ultimately at the end, you would end up with actually having paid it back at the time, by the time that, how many years is it? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. By the 10 year timeline that is portrayed in the table. And I just wanted to say that I'm in favor of you doing that. For example, the first item, first line item has that we would owe like 23,000. And so if we paid that, we could bank the 727 and so on, I'm not gonna bore you with all the math that you already well know. But I would prefer to think at the end of this cycle that we would not have any debt and that the money is the total dollar amount as I understand would then be at the end of this time, a $1.5 million that would be available to the community. And I would like to see those free and not encumbered by any debt, that residual debt that was carried forward. So I feel pretty strongly about this. And so I was motivated to speak tonight. If I've interpreted that table incorrectly, I apologize, but I know Rich and Catherine and you will, and Karen obviously will have critical eyeballs, but I think we'd be better off paying our debt as we go. So thank you. Thank you Sharon. I believe not seeing anyone else raise their hand to indicate they wanna speak at the public forum. So I will close the public forum and move now to item 3.01. We have three items for approval and recommendation of the city council. The first is an authorization to amend contracts with on-call water resources, excavations, contractors. This is a DPW water resources item. I see we have Megan here and Chapin. And I see Councillor Hightower it's here as well now. Sorry if I missed you before and who would like to speak to this? The decision director Megan Boyer, take it away. We're coming back to you. This is one of our tools in the toolbox, if you will, for the numbers of emergency emergencies that we can encounter. We do have in-house crews, but from time to time because of crew availability or sometimes because of simultaneous breaks, we certainly have had three water main breaks all happening at the same time. And also because of capability of equipment. Sometimes things are particularly big, particularly gnarly. And so in October, 2020, we had brought forward to you this on-call water resources excavation contract. So these are people that we pre-qualify. We set a upper limiting dollar amount on the total amount of work that can be awarded to them. And then as jobs come up, we execute work assignment agreements. We also put in place for each of these contractors a sort of emergency placeholder, which enables us to move quickly and swiftly in the middle of the night without having to do a lot of paperwork and get them started on any particular project. So previously we had set maximum limiting amounts of 200,000 for each of these contractors and we're asking to increase those to 400,000. The only one of the contractors that sort of has bumped up against the $200,000 limit is our work with ECI. As we note in the memo, we did exceed the $200,000, but that was after discussion and approval by CAO Shod when we had an emergency sewer issue on South Prospect. I don't know if I'm missing anything else. We're also increasing, there's an upper limiting amount for all contracts on how much we can spend. So the total of everything that we've spent with these contractors can exceed 750,000 without coming back to you all for additional approvals. Thank you, Megan. How would the board like to proceed? Are we ready for a motion or have further questions? Councillor Hightower. I'm happy to move the recommended action as listed on board docs to recommend that the city council authorize the directivity of public works to execute an on-call contract as noted. Sorry, second. Great. Further discussion? We'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? The motion carries unanimously. Thank you, Megan and Chapin. Thank you, appreciate it. Have a great night. You too. Okay, 3.02, Waterfront TIF. Application for Substantial Change. Our consultant, David White, is here to lead the discussion. This is an important follow-up from past conversations we've had as we talked about during the discussions around the development agreement. The plan has been for some time to go back to Pepsi, the body that regulates, oversees the TIF program and attempt to secure a major change, major amendment to the initial plan that was approved years ago. So this has been in the works for some time and we're getting to crunch time on it. And David's been working very hard on this. So I think, David, if there's anything else you'd like me to speak to to kick things off, I'll hand it over to you for further brief overview and then we'll take questions. So let me, a few things. So first for the record, I am David White, President of Whitenburg Real Estate Advisors and I've been working with the city now for some time on both the TIF districts actually, but the major focus has been relative to the Waterfront TIF district and particularly that portion of it that relates to city place and the three properties in the core of downtown, the former Burlington town center that have been authorized by the legislature to have an extended lifespan, an extra decade beyond the rest of the TIF district. And I did send out late this afternoon. There was distributed an updated memo and updated table that I apologize for being so late but as I mentioned in what I sent out Friday, I was, there was a distinct possibility that there would be further changes and indeed there have been in the intervening period of time. So what I'm gonna share with you tonight is the latest version. It's what was sent out late this afternoon and I'm happy to respond to any questions relative to that. So stepping back for a moment and thinking about the big picture of all of this, the underlying major portion of the TIF district, the life of that with respect to the city's authority to retain the incremental education taxes expires as of the end of fiscal 25. So there's, we're about two and a half years left in the life of that TIF district. But then we've got an extra decade beyond to the end of fiscal 35 to retain the incremental education taxes for those three properties that constitute the former Burlington Town Center plus the LL Bean building. And the cash flow I've put together looks at that 12 and a half year, actually 13 year period because I begin with the beginning of FY 23, which we're already partway through. And I take it through the end of FY 20, 36 because even though the TIF district retention period ends in FY 35, there are expenses that following year, particularly the biggest expense being that the state auditor will come back and audit the closing of the TIF district and there will be not only a charge from the state auditor, but various associated costs for the city to deal with all of that. So I actually carry the cash flow through FY 36. Now, key to all of this with respect to how we move forward are several factors. One of them is that as I think you're well aware, the city has obtained through the excellent work of now retired Senator Leahy, a $12 million earmark for the reconstruction of Cherry Street all the way from Battery up to South Winoski Avenue and rebuilding it to the Great Street standards. Now that requires a $3 million match. So it's a total $15 million budget, 3 million of which the city has to come up with. The second key thing is that the city has applied for what's called a reconnecting communities grant. And while that has, we haven't heard a decision on that, we're optimistic that we'll get it. There are some key factors around this grant. One is that it is specifically designed for situations essentially exactly what we have here, which is where prior federal programs, and in this case urban renewal, actually cut off neighborhoods. Well, this is about as that's exactly what happened here and where the proposal is to use funds to reconnect. And so we believe this is dead center for the purpose of that grant. The second key factor why we're hopeful that the city will actually get this funding is because they're also looking for things that are so-called shovel ready. And certainly this one is, city place itself is now under construction. So we're hopeful around that. But we haven't heard yet, we don't know for sure. But if that comes, we expect to use about $10 million that grant toward the reconstruction of battery, excuse me, Pine and St. Paul Street, as well as Bank Street, and that that requires an additional approximately 4,150,000. So we're looking for about $7,150,000 of local funds to help match those two grants so that we can leverage those grants to maximize what happens. So that's a key piece of what's going on here. A second key piece is that this thing has gone on long enough for delays that everybody's amply aware of that the original what are called related costs that were authorized by Vepsi and by the city council and by the voters are no longer sufficient. It's just simply those costs, those dollars have been eaten up over time. And so additional dollars are needed. Now that doesn't have to go beyond the total approved budget for a piece of historic context. The total approved budget going back to 2016 was 21 million, 830,000 dollars. We're not proposing to go beyond that total budget. In fact, I expect we'll end up under that budget. But within that, there's a subset of what are called related costs. And those are the costs that pay for management and administration of the district and also pay for implementation, things such as the costs of attorneys and my fees, frankly, for working, negotiating with the developers for preparing development agreements, for working on financial analyses, all those kinds of related costs that aren't the direct capital costs or design fees for the capital costs. And so part of what we're looking for is approval for an increased budget for those costs so that the city has enough money authorized still within that 21 million and change cap, but within that to be able to pay for its costs over the next 13 years till the end of the district, 14 years actually, including the final year I talked about, 2036, to pay its costs to administer and manage the district. So those are a couple of key factors. Now along the way, as I'm sure you're aware, city place is now under construction, hallelujah. And as part of the development agreement that was negotiated by the administration and approved previously by the city council, so the so-called ARTA 2.0, there are various fees that the developer is obligated to pay. And those include both, there are two key areas that add up to a substantial amount of money. The first one is to look at that period of time between 2019 and when they actually got under construction to compensate for the city for the taxes that were not paid because they demolished them all before they actually were ready to get under construction. And that's about $541,000 in change, total over the next few years. The second piece is that they are also obligated to pay the city's interest costs between when the city incurs the debt that we will be proposing and when they get their certificate of occupancy and the project actually hits the tax rolls. So those combined are a key element of the additional taxes. The next piece is that, and this is the biggest single change between what I sent Friday and what was sent this afternoon. And that is that we have included in the revised version so-called phase two of city place. In the Friday version, I included the projected incremental taxes only from phase one, which is what's under construction today. Phase two is that portion that includes the remaining portion of them all that fronts on Church Street plus the LL Bean building. And we have reason to believe that there's a much higher, in fact we're quite optimistic at this point that that will be proceeding and proceeding within a reasonable timeframe. So we have added those in. The upshot of all of this is that the projections at this stage of the game, because we don't really need the incremental taxes from that supplemental portion to pay what we expect to be the debt, which is about $16 million. But nonetheless, it's a much more compelling picture and it gives the city greater flexibility to be able to incur some additional debt if it deems it would like to have that debt in order to either pay for matching costs or in the event that it doesn't get the second grant source, the reconnecting communities grant, to be able to borrow additional money to pay at least some of the, for some of the improvements that otherwise would have been paid for by the grant. So there's a, what we've done here with the revised version that was sent out today is to provide additional flexibility for the city, although at the present time, we're anticipating not changing the bonding amount. I wanna be clear also that we're not gonna be asking the city council when it votes on authorizing an application to VEPSI for final approval of this. At that time the city council won't be asked to make a final decision on the final bonding, excuse me, bonding dollar amount. That decision will come later. Right now we're giving you our best estimate of what we expect, but we don't have to make a final decision and the bonds won't be until probably around the beginning of April and we'll be coming back to the city council at that point so that gives us several more months in which to develop additional information to be able to confirm that phase two is on schedule, et cetera. So all of that plays into then the cash flow and I'm happy to share the revised cash flow if that makes sense. You tell me. Yeah, why don't we pause there for a second David? Glad you hit strongly that last point. I think, and I'll just amplify it just to make sure we're on the same page. We'll have a future important decision between now and June, probably close somewhere in late May or June, I assume. If I may interrupt, just a moment. I do think that we're gonna wanna make a decision in early April in order to provide rich, good one in the time to then go to market with the bond. So I think it's gonna be more in the April timeframe. All right, thank you. So that's important clarification. So not that long from now, we'll be back to have an important decision about how much we want to bond for. Tonight is not that night. We will have more time with the projections and you'll have more time to kind of kick the tires on where, that's an important discussion. And tonight's important as well, but I just wanna make clear that that's the one that really goes to the financial commitments the city will be taking on. Tonight is a step on the road to that where we are telegraphing to VepC how we are thinking about it currently and seeking their approval. But the system, the way it works is that the actual debt decision will come later. So with that, why don't we pause and see if there are questions from the Board of Finance at this time. Go ahead, Councilor McGee. Thank you and thanks, David, for the presentation. I didn't get a ton of time to look at the new memo before the meeting tonight. So I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what the difference would have been including just phase one as opposed to now including phases one and two for the bonding amount and what the impact would be. Certainly. So if you assume that the bonding will be the 16 million, which is what we're currently projecting will be the bonding amount. Then under if it is, we do not include phase two at the end of the life of the district I'm currently projecting a roughly a million dollar surplus. And actually to Sharon Busher's earlier comments, let me just say that the way this spreadsheet is set up is that it does, even in the earlier version, it does pay for itself by the end of the life of the district. There is no remaining debt at the end of the life of the district and I'm very comfortable with those numbers. That said, there have been several changes made. The biggest one is including phase two. And that the numbers are somewhat better in even without phase two than what I showed you on Friday. But it's about 1.1, 1.2 million surplus is what we're projecting. Now, under the new version, it's considerably higher because we're including all that revenue from phase two. It's at about 8.5 million. In either case, I expected to fully pay for itself. And just to clarify, when there is a surplus that goes back to the ed fund and its proportion and to the city general fund and its proportion. So it's favorable. One thing I wanted to add that I didn't, I wasn't able to get here as David started is just this compressed timeline that we're on because of Pepsi's deadlines and that we have February 3rd as a submission deadline. So that's why we're with you tonight and at the council for public hearing this coming Monday so that we can meet that deadline. If we don't meet that deadline, our chances of meeting other deadlines unless, I don't think we'd actually be able to make it actually. One other minor clarification, which is that the mayor mentioned that this is an application for substantial change. And that's the term that Vepsi uses anytime you come back in to basically update what you're doing. From my perspective, this is not a substantial change. That is that if you think about it in terms of the real substance of what's going on here, which is we're talking about three properties and city place and its phases and its tax revenue. And we're within the already previously approved maximum amount, which has been approved by the city council, the voters and Vepsi previously. So I actually don't see this as substantial. It's really just an update, but that's the technical term they use just to be clear. And I appreciate that clarification. And I think we appreciate the process of giving them, there has been some evolution of the project over time. This puts in front of them squarely, exactly the way we're thinking about it now. Well, and to be clear, the legislative authorization to issue debt requires us to go back. That is we need to be able to show to them a not less than a $50 million construction contract. We now have that in hand. In fact, what we have in hand is just a here below 60 million. Although we fully anticipate the full construction cost, so we have about 165 million. Not all of that's been actually contracted as yet, but we've met the minimum threshold the legislature established. And then we also have to provide from the developer a construction guarantee. So we have this obligation to go back regardless. Okay, great. Further questions or are we ready for a motion? There is no motion listed here. Says it's communication discussion and information. Sir, so this is purely informational. We'll be back, but Monday we are looking for counsel, Boarding Council endorsement of the package. Yes, at the city council meeting, I believe it's the 23rd. The VEPC process obligates us to have a public hearing that the city council will do and also will require an affirmative vote from the city council authorizing the submission of the application for substantial change. Okay, so the value of this time is if, you know, knowing that that's coming next week, is there anything else that board members are gonna be looking for in order to be able to make that recommendation, that approval next week? Go ahead, Councilor Hathar. Sorry, I wasn't sure if you could see me or not without me speaking up. Which isn't, just if we have any questions about this who that we wanna bring up in anticipation of the next meeting, who do you want us to email? I will handle them and I will consult with David as we respond. I think it's probably the most efficient way to do that. Great, thank you. Okay, great. And yes, thank you for that very much. Welcome that, Councilor Hathar. If there are questions between now and next week, let us know through Brian. So if there is no further discussion on 3.02, I'll move to 3.03, which is also a communication and informational item in advance of future action. Catherine, do you wanna speak to this? This is the review of the FY22 audit. Yes, thank you. You may have noticed there was a little bit of confusion on an earlier draft of the agenda. We got a little bit ahead of ourselves and had asked for acceptance and approval of the audit. But you might remember from my riveting training last week, you do not yet have all of the documents from all pieces of the audit yet. So it's a little premature to do that. Tonight, we're gonna go over our auditor. We'll actually go over our summary of the general fund audit results. And that will be communication only. And in a few weeks, when we have all of those pieces put together, including the audit results from BED and the school, we will come back and ask for action on that item. So this is a process we did last year to make sure you have the information on the general fund as soon as possible and have a chance to ask questions on that. So without any further delay, I will turn it over to our lead auditor, Alina. Thank you, Katherine. Good evening, everyone. I'm Alina Korsak. As Katherine mentioned, I'm here as a lead auditor. I'm a principal in charge of your independent financial statement audit. So I'd like to go over some of those results and I am gonna share a PowerPoint because I'm not sure if you have it in front of you. So we'll start with objectives for tonight. Objectives is to go through a firm update because there has been a change that was effective January 1st. And as I mentioned, we'll go through results of the audit and particularly general fund results as Katherine mentioned. We will also review the management letter and those all are in draft form as the full audit has not yet been completed just as Katherine mentioned. So this is a firm update. This was a press release on January 3rd and it mentioned that Melanson pretty much does not exist anymore. The last day of Melanson was technically December 31st. So effective January 1st, we merged into Markham. I don't wanna read about us as you are familiar with us. So I'd like to mention a few things about Markham, the firm we merged into. They are top ranked national firm. According to 2022 accounting today, they're the 15th largest CPA firm in the country with 550 partners and 4100 associates. And associates is just something they call employees. So the firm has 4100 employees. The city of Burlington will continue to be serviced out of our Mary McMahamsha office. That office is now the leading governmental audit office for Markham LLP due to the size of our clients and the number of them. We happen to have them all concentrated here, even though Markham does have governmental offices. In New England region, it's mostly in Rhode Island and they do have a Boston office and they'll go into the national footprint on the next slide. They have governmental audits in Florida and other places but I just wanna mention that your office that's gonna be servicing you will be the governmental leading audit office for Markham LLP. So this is the national footprint that I mentioned. Nicely, it does have a concentration in Northeast which is good for us. That's where we are. So we have experience that just expanded in our region including governmental as I mentioned. So Mayor McMahamsha is now on a map as you could see. This map also includes other offices. We had four with Melanson. So Ellsworth, Maine and the one in Massachusetts, Greenfield, Massachusetts, those were Melanson and all those offices is now Markham. So this is now the firm that is servicing you. Now the good news is that we will keep a name until May 31st in order for us to finish all the projects for the last June fiscal year. So there's no substantial disruptions, meaning we still have projects to do for you after we issue the independent standalone and the price financial statements and then we issue the ACRA. We still have single audits to do and we do a lot for you. And those that do March 31st and then the TIF APs do April 15th. So we still have projects going on. So the good news is you shouldn't feel too much disruption. We did have a blackout period last week but we are back running and everything's gonna be issued under Melanson but starting the next fiscal year is where that's going to change. The name will be Markham. So we are technically a Markham company right now but next year you won't see the name Melanson at all. So that's the footprint. Now we'll go into your general fund and you also have four Excel tabs to go along with that. So and if I could screen share that as well or if it's easier I can just stay in PowerPoint. This is a 10-year history of the general fund unassigned fund balance. You could see it went from negative 2 million in fiscal year 13 to fiscal year 22, 8.6 million. And just a quick mention because it does look odd at the beginning here that that fiscal stability bond fiscal year, 2013 series that matures in 2028 had a balance of 4.8 million at June 30, 2022. It was original amount of 9 million. But I'd like to point out on this slide that you could see the last six years very nice, very consistent all within eight to 10 million dollar range. And that's what you like to see is that trend. So that's a nice slide there. And then again the nice thing about this slide is that your policy has a benchmark, five to 15% of operational costs is where you want your unassigned fund balance in general fund with a target of around 10%. And you could see how nicely you met that. You're right around, in the middle, right where you wanna be around your 10% target. So at 11.7% at 6.30, 22. And now we're gonna go through some budget versus actual highlights. So on your Excel tabs, you have the balance sheet, you have the income statement, second tab. So this is the third tab. So on the slide, it's out, I, we actually not quite at that tab. We are at the first tab, general fund balance sheet tab. We are looking at the classifications of general fund, fund balance. So non-spendable, there is really not much you could do that that basically is an offset to prepaid expenses on the balance sheet. It's also offset to your inventory and your long-term advances or inter-fund loans. And then restricted again, that's mostly is premium. So you can't do, you can't just spend premiums for anything that has to be spent for future, either capital or debt service. So that is restricted until you spend it. And in your last tab, the fund balance detail step, you have more detail behind these numbers. Committed mostly public records. There's a small amount in that category and the bigger categories are assigned and unassigned. So the detail for those, as I mentioned in the last tab, the fund balance details tab in Excel, mostly in your assigned, there is a million dollars for general liability insurance this year. And you could see how it compares to a lot here because the tabs in Excel have comparison to the previous year. So that was the same last year. You'll notice for example, that the health insurance, you assigned 1.5 million last year. This year you assigned 750 million at the bottom is where you could see the new one. So there's a lot of detail to it. So I'm just pointing out the highlights. So of course, if you have a higher assigned, then your unassigned would be lower. So for example, if your management assigns and then of course, a city council approves, if that was closer to last year's number of 7 million, then your unassigned would be a little higher and you would be basically closer to where you were the last year in unassigned. So that's more of a category that you look through in detail and see what needs to be assigned. Management does it and then takes it for approval. So the total fund balance is slightly higher than last year, 22 million compared to a million. And you'll see on the income statement tab or the second tab in Excel that the profit for general fund was a million dollars and that's what makes the total fund balance go up. Now on the next step is where we're gonna go into the budget versus actual results. So I segregated the use of fund balance in this slide because that doesn't have an actual source. It's like you're using prior year, surplus reserve balance is like prior assigned is what it is, is what you're using. So it doesn't have an actual tap so you could see that that's the draw on your budgetary results because you're using those assigned numbers from the previous year. So revenues, which on the detailed general fund budget versus actual tab in Excel is everything above the use of fund balance. That is very close to what you budgeted at 599,000. And then if you look at the bottom part which is expenditures and transfers the total of those unspent amounts comes to 4.6 million. So which is resulting in a million dollar budgetary surplus which is also what you have in the income statement because you don't care, that you don't use incumbents accounting here and have a different numbers on budgetary basis. So with that, we'll go into the next slide and this is just a recommendation. Budget versus actual is a very complicated schedule and it's a complicated process and currently your self insurance funds they roll up in your general fund. So they're included in that budget versus actual. So we made a recommendation to adopt official separate internal service funds. The benefit being is that you won't need to go through the assigned categories for those and do that separately every year because those will be separate funds and automatically close into the net position of those funds and be used for those purposes in the future. And also the way the budget versus actual nets out because you have to net out the inter fund activity is you have the participant charges and the claims all netted within that non-departmental category in this general fund budget versus actual which makes it complicated to see what it really just dilutes and what the true results are of that category. So we just make a recommendation that you officially establish internal service funds for those. And on the management letter draft and of course we can't make this management letter final until the audit is final but we are not gonna be making changes to the management letter. The general fund will have immaterial changes. Management letter will stay as is. So in the management letter we had three comments last year, three comments this year and just wanted to point out there are no significant deficiencies here or material weaknesses. This is what they call other matters basically other recommendations that we came out for the city. The first one is being repeated. This was a really hard year for the city was a very challenging year due to substantial staff turnover and a rare organization and it just was a really hard year. So we mentioned in the first comment in the management letter that when we got the general fund trial bonus on December 1st it looked like there was a loss of $7 million but as you can see now in your income statement and BBA tabs it's a profit of a million dollars. So there were a lot of changes that were made really late. So there were substantial journal entries that were done and you could see the response there for the city. The second comment just to point out there was another significant change that had to be made for that comment and because of another issue that happened where a late correction had to be made where the $2 million went into CEDA instead of going into Moray Capital Project Fund. So the third comment is no longer relevant prior year for this year. As mentioned briefly in the first comment and we mentioned how a lot of these they're not just issues that stand alone they affect your main operating fund, your general fund. So they are all tied. So the third issue particularly here relating to pension there was an as you know issue happened that affected and needed to have another late entry done because the issue was not resolved until way after year end but we also wanna keep stressing that any to prevent any future risk just go through and clean that language in a collective bargaining agreements to make sure it matches your city ordinance to make sure there's nothing else that can arise that can cause city anymore loss. So we would strongly recommend that. That's the management letter and I will turn it back for questions and discussion and stop sharing. Thank you so much Alina. Any questions from the board? Yes President Paul. Thanks. I haven't had a chance to go through the Excel spreadsheet so I'm not really sure what's there and what isn't there. The only point that I would make is that I think this is the improve the general ledger monitoring and posting late journal entries is a prior year comment but it's not just a prior year comment. I think it's been in the management letter for four years. Maybe five I didn't look that far back but I did look back for. So to me that is something that is while perhaps not according to the auditor material deficiency it is something that must be addressed and I think it's important to understand that if they're late journal entries posted by in this case the client meaning the city are one thing I think what's more concerning to me perhaps is simply that some of the journal entries are being identified through analytical procedures which means had it not been for that they would not have been found. So that and they're not small they're significant. So I would hope that there's a response from the city that is identifying a person and I would hope that in the reasonably near future that you would come to us and let us know exactly what that plan is and so that we don't have that comment next year. Other than that as I say I have not had a chance to look at it so that's really as far as I can go. Thanks very much. I appreciate that comment and as someone who has looked at all the previous management letters this is the fourth year for that comment. It first appeared in FY 19 and so it is something that is my highest priority and will be the highest priority for the CT office and before we come back asking for your approval and acceptance of this audit you will have in hand for me and I expect a discussion, a plan of how we get to where both we think we need to be and the auditors think we need to be because we're already halfway through this fiscal year. So there's not that much time to catch up but catch up we will. I also just wanted to add that because it has been four years for those who aren't aware the CAO has not been with the city for four years. It was two months prior to the start of COVID in January of 2020 that you first came and clearly there were many issues that happened very, very quickly after you began. So I fully appreciate that. I know it's a priority for you and I appreciate the fact that you inherited this and will be the one to successfully address it. So thank you. Thank you. And I do appreciate that it is the job of this board to hold me accountable to doing that. So thank you. Other questions or comments? Don't worry there'll be plenty of time for you to dig into that Excel and ask more questions later but I know we're bumping up against our other meeting time. Okay. Yes, given that I see the people starting to gather for that. Again, as we said with the last item if board members do have any further questions they want to address at any point between now and when this comes back with the final audit for acceptance we're happy to respond to those questions as well. And I appreciate the discussion here at the end and fully, Catherine has my full support in taking the action necessary to fully address this item and I agree with the notion that it needs to be the highest priority in the department at this point. So with that I think we've completed our agenda and if there's no objection I will adjourn the board finance at 6.01 p.m.