ThisWeek CW 11/09/2011
Canal Winchester officials are still learning of changes that have come with the village’s transition to city status.
City finance director, Nanisa Osborn told council at its Nov. 7 meeting that the city will have to account for its assets for its 2011 tax reporting, a task that was unnecessary when Canal Winchester was a village.
“We’re working to identify all of the assets of the city,” she said. “This is a task we didn’t think we’d have to do until time for 2012 reporting but we just learned that we have to complete it for 2011.
“We know what our liabilities are because we’ve always needed those, but we have to work our way through our assets, which are much more complicated,” she said. “But we need to work that out before the end of the year.”
City council members questioned what sort of things would be considered assets that aren’t already accounted for.
“We have miles of pipe in the ground that we have to account for, traffic signals and lights — basically everything we have with a value of more than $500,” Osborn said. “We’ve done a good job over the past years identifying our assets that we track for other purposes, like all of our signs have a letter and number attached to them so we can track them for maintenance, and now I can use that list for asset-tracking. But everything else, like the stuff underground, will still have to be dealt with.”
Osborn said this task of accounting for all the city’s assets will be “a very big chore,” but going forward, the city will have processes in place so the assets will be tracked from the get-go.
“We’ll have a database that’s updated as assets are acquired,” she said. “At this point, I can’t give a good number (for the value of the assets), but in a couple weeks, I could probably give an accurate account,” Osborn said.
She said Canal Winchester also will need to have legislation in place adopting the health regulations of the Franklin County Board of Health so the board will be able to enforce its health codes citywide.
“They want us to have them approved prior to 2012,” Osborn said. “In the past, since we contracted with both the Franklin County Board of Health and the Fairfield County Board of Health, this wasn’t an issue, but with a contract with only Franklin County, they don’t have the authority to enforce their regulations in parts of our city that are in Fairfield County unless we adopt the Franklin County regulations citywide.”
Osborn said that she hopes to have the regulations before city council for a vote at its Nov. 21 meeting.