5.3 ERMUSR 02-09-2021 - Laserfiche WebLink

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______________________________________________________________________________ Page 7 of 8 • Paperless Initiative Evaluation – This initiative was created to research options to move to a paperless business environment. There are multiple areas to review for this and some things have already been put into place without any research done because they were efficiencies already built into our software that we just needed to incorporate into our work processes. Payroll Timecards became paperless when we moved to NISC five years ago. Purchase Order approvals and Accounts Payable processing became paperless in 2020, with no cash outlay costs involved, only time for implementation analysis and training. • Organizational Effectiveness Survey – This will be an ongoing initiative over multiple years. The first survey was done in 2018 and produced eight initiatives. Several initiatives were started in 2019, some were completed in 2020 and some additional ones were started in 2020. We have Employee Training that will continue through 2021, and Leadership Development will start in 2021 and continue through the next two years. The standard work will continue in 2021 as well. Many of these initiatives are going to integrated into ERMU processes and budgets indefinitely. We will conduct additional surveys to gauge our effectiveness in years to come and evaluate the changes that we are making along the way. Review of the 2020 Annual Business Plan The purpose of reviewing the 2020 Annual Business Plan is to evaluate the budget as a tool in addition to performance. By evaluating the usefulness of the tool, staff will be better able to provide monthly information and reports to help the commission evaluate the organization health and direction. Understanding and exploring the areas of risk and sensitivity factors improves the governing body’s ability to set policy redirecting an organization toward the short term and long-term goals. The Annual Business Plan review should help the commission identify areas of higher risk, evaluate options to mitigate risk, establish their comfort level with risk, and help the commission clearly communicate expectation in handling the risk. Overall Electric Utility performance for 2020 was positive on a year where sales were down compared to our projections due to COVID. Expenses were also down due to COVID, and some capital projects were not completed, thus resulted in favorable performance. Unaudited financials indicate that electric margins significantly outperformed budget ($1,134,325 budget, $2,870,130 actual). Revenue performance was 1% lower than budgeted due to COVID, the annual expenses were 6% lower than budget. And net to reserve was higher than budgeted (- $689,453 budget, $2,546,230 actual). Overall Water Utility performance for 2020 was positive as well. Unaudited financials indicate that water margins outperformed budget (-$261,954 budget, $833,996 actual). Revenue was up 26% ($2,838,582 budget, $3,568,276 actual) while annual water expenses were down by 12% ($3,100,536 budget, $2,734,280 actual). And net to reserves was higher than budgeted ($386,385 budget, $1,037,770 actual). 67