By CHRIS FROST
Eagle Times News Editor
CLAREMONT, NH — The city council tabled repurposing the 2021 bond until the Jan. 24 meeting, citing the need for answers to questions not addressed on Wednesday.
Councilor Bill Limoges motioned to table the item, which Councilor Spencer Batchelder seconded.
The city issued a $1 million 2021 General Obligation Bond on Jan. 6, 2021, to finance equipment and improvements to the Communications Dispatch Center.
Councilor Nicholas Koloski said he hopes the city receives federal funds for the dispatch center but wants to see the funds laid out.
The money was slated to pay for a communications and Record Management System (RMS) upgrade. The communications upgrade includes new base station radios and mountain top receivers, new repeaters across the city and new cruiser mobile radios.
The city anticipates receiving federal or state funding to complete the 2021 Project and has not spent the 2021 Bond.
Finance Director Diane Mulholland said the bond is approaching three years, and the money needs to be repurposed to avoid paying penalties.
“My proposal is to take the elevator project we have in the capital budget and use those funds to pay for that rather than using the fund balance to pay for that project,” she said. “In talking to the bond council, they also allow us to take the bond payment we have to make in February and use the bond to make the bond payment.”
The elevator project refers to the City Hall & Police Department/Court elevator modernization. She said most of the bond payments are in the debt budget, freeing up funding, but nobody can spend it without transferring it to another budget.
“I’m trying to reserve the funding if we need to do the communication center later,” Mulholland said.
City Manager Yoshi Manale said the City of Claremont was designated $1.2 million of congressional direct dpending for the communications center.
“Hopefully, that will be allocated for that project,” said Manale. “We still would have approximately $843,000 if that fell through for whatever if the federal government didn’t fund it. We would still have cash to spend on the project, which is the intended purpose of the bond. If we do get the congressional spending, that money would be freed for a different project.”
Mayor Dale Girard noted most resolutions transferring money into accounts always list what the accounts were and how much they were doing.
“It was concerning that we got it in memo form,” said Girard. “Today, I took the time to pull out the budget book, and again, some of the line items Mr. Manale put in there doesn’t match up to any budget line items.”
He sees issues with placing the money into fund balances because the city proposes to give money to both enterprise funds.
“Enterprise funds both have their own separate fund balances if I’m not mistaken,” Girard said. “Without us doing line item transfers to get that money back out of the departments, it’s going to stay as fund balance inside the enterprise funds.”
Mulholland said she was taking the actual payment, where they come from and trying to distribute the money back.
“I could change it to be all coming from the debt service,” she said. “There is a payment due in February and a second payment due in August. We can take the first payment and restructure it to be the water and sewer payment. There are payments that come out of water and sewer for this bond.”
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