Finance Director Steve Groom presented Federal Way’s Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for 2024 at the city council meeting on Oct. 7.

Groom promised the council members and audience that “this is going to be more entertaining than it sounds,” and proceeded to share highlights of the city’s financial position over the past year.

The city’s net position, total revenue, balance of the general fund and total cash and investments all increased, Groom shared.

The report directs readers to the exact pages where details of these wins can be found, and Groom walked the council through the specifics during his presentation.

The city’s total net position, for example, can be found on page 17 of the report. Specifically, the net position increased by $27.5 million or 4.2% to $678.6 million at year end, Groom said.

The city’s revenue increased by $30 million over the prior year. Expenses also increased, but only by $25 million.

“That’s a net gain of $5 million. And that sounds pretty good, right?” Groom said.

The general fund is the “single most important indicator of a city’s financial strength,” Groom said, and shared that the general fund’s ending balance of $22.7 million is an increase of $6.6 million over the prior year.

These numbers were shared with the caveat that this general fund balance is different than the number discussed by the council.

“Now some of you on the dais are thinking, now wait a minute, every month we meet at finance committee and we say that general fund has to be $9 million. Well government, welcome to government accounting standards,” Groom said. “We make it more complicated than it needs to be all across America.”

The reason for this difference is that for this report, they group funds together including both the general fund and what they call the “street fund.” For budgetary control they separate these funds, but for this report, they are grouped together.

Groom’s last highlight was that the total cash and investments increased from $114.4 million to $146.6 million.

The city also received a Certificate of Achievement for Excellence in Financial Reporting for the year ending Dec. 31, 2023. This marks the 34th year in a row that the city has received this award from the Government Financial Officers Association of the United States and Canada (GFOA).

This award focuses on the preparation of the report itself, not the actual financial management within the city. Specifically, “in order to be awarded a Certificate of Achievement, a government must publish an easily readable and efficiently organized annual comprehensive financial report. This report must satisfy both generally accepted accounting principles and applicable legal requirements,” the report states.

After the presentation, Councilmember Hoang Tran, who is chair of the Finance, Economic Development and Regional Affairs Committee (FEDRAC), said he asked Groom to highlight the work that he and the other finance staff did for the city because “when we work in the public sector, we don’t often hear the good work that that we did. We only hear when things go sideways, right?”

The report includes even more highlights about what the city is proud of.

Some of these include that “the City issued debt for financing land acquisition and construction of an operations and maintenance facility” and that “the City created a Tax Increment District in the town center to capture and pool future increased property tax that would otherwise not occur.”

The report explained that “by freezing combining the collective incremental increase, the City leverages future County, Library, Fire District, and City Property Tax that would only occur as a result of infrastructure improvements in the Tax Increment Area.”

More information about the budget and the city’s finances can be found on the city’s Financial Reports and Audits page and on the City Budget page.