| During last September's Budget Committee meeting it was determined that
the City's should bring in an outside consultant to review AFN revenue
opportunities, look at internal operations and staffing levels, and help
revise the AFN Pro Forma based on their expertise and new information that
would be gathered. The City hired Navigant Consulting of Austin Texas via
an RFQ process to accomplish these tasks.
Navigant visited Ashland in early November to gather information and met
with city staff and also had an initial brainstorming meeting with the AFN
advisory committee. This committee is made up of Russ Silbiger, Marty Levine,
Alan Douma, Rick Barth, Jim Teece, Mayor De Boer and City Staff from AFN,
Finance and Administration. Dave Williams has been substituting for Marty
Levine however as Marty has been unable to attend recently because of his
busy work schedule.
Navigant also commissioned a market research phone survey of Ashland Citizens
and Businesses in early December to gather more information as a part of
their research on this project.
The Advisory committee met with Navigant a second time on March 1st, and
we have had 2 additional meetings of the committee with Navigant staff joining
by phone since then.
Working through this process the committee, staff and Navigant have been
able to refine Navigant's initial recommendations and the result is a set
of initiatives that should improve the revenue that AFN can generate by making
our internal operations more efficient and by launching some new products
and marketing efforts. All of these ideas were thoroughly reviewed and discussed
by everyone involved in the process and the results were then imported into
the revised AFN Pro Forma. This Pro Forma has been included with the
communication and in the view of the staff, the consultant and the Advisory
committee, it represents one possible reasonable, conservative future scenario
that is achievable by AFN.
With this revised Pro Forma we propose that we use it to continually monitor
and report to the council our progress on meeting targets and also continue
to use it as a guide to make mid course corrections as circumstances dictate.
We hope to use the Pro Forma to continually update and monitor the progress
that is being achieved by the new initiatives and change our operations quickly
if warranted. While the Pro Forma represents a reasonable conservative future
we hope to exceed plan targets and will do our utmost to achieve maximum
performance and improve AFN's bottom line beyond the one spelled out by the
Pro Forma.
That said, there are still internal borrowing amounts and cash flow issues
that are not resolved by this revision. We hope to continue to work on these
in conjunction with the committee, with a goal that solutions to these issues
will be presented as soon as staff can complete the work necessary to bring
this item back to the City Council. Acceptance of this revised Pro Forma
will enable us to prepare the AFN budget for presentation to the Budget Committee
in the upcoming budget cycle.
Navigant will be present at the March 18th meeting to present their findings
on this project and city staff will also review the revised Pro Forma with
the Mayor and City Council and Budget Committee. |
