The Village of Kensington Board of Trustees used what Mayor Susan Lopatkin characterized as a somewhat “strange” surplus in one of its reserve funds this week to fund a renovation project at the community’s pool facility.
During its regular meeting on Tuesday at Kensington Village Hall, the board approved a resolution that appropriated $68,000 for repairs at the pool.
The “strange” aspect of the resolution came from the source of the funding. Trustees used a portion of an unexpected surplus of $137,000 in the village’s snow removal fund, following last winter’s near-record snow storms.
“We thought that was really, really a nice find,” Lopatkin said. “We have a lot of money in reserves and we also have a lot of unappropriated funding. Every year we use some money as appropriation. The last two years we really haven’t spent much of it because we’ve come in under budget.”
And it was a meeting Lopatkin had last week with village clerk/treasurer Arlene Giniger and accountant John Lundy in which the surplus was discovered.
Lopatkin said the purpose of the meeting was “just to go over our financial statements in light of working on the budget at the moment.”
When Lundy advised Lopatkin and Giniger that the village had the sizeable excess in its reserve account, the Kensington officials were surprised.
“He said, ‘you will never spend that. No one has that. I don’t know where this came from. You don’t need this much in reserves,'” Lopatkin recalled of the meeting.
“It’s very strange,” she added. “But sometimes you look at something, we asked a question and we learned something new.”
Beside its reserve account for snow removal, Kensington has two other reserve accounts for its building department and its pool.
Trustee Alina Hendler, who is also the village’s parks and pool commissioner, said the $68,000 will be used for repairs to the pool’s “infrastructure of what already exists.”
The remaining $69,000 in the snow removal fund will remain in that village reserve fund in case of another large snowfall this year.
Once money is designated to one of the village’s reserve funds, it cannot be switched to the village general fund, Lopatkin said.
“There’s no major overhaul, but it seems a likely source of funding to us if we can use it,” the mayor said of the repairs to the pool. “Certainly the excess reserves, we use for a purpose. That purpose (now) is to fix the pool.”
