A Crookston Ways and Means meeting was on Monday, March 3, immediately following the City Council meeting. This meeting had three discussion items, the first being a request to amend the city purchasing policy. This was geared specifically at increasing the limit for the City Administrator to $25,000 and the limit for department heads to $10,000. “The purchasing policy has been out there for a few years. The question we had was whether the council wants to change the amounts or not,” says City Administrator Jeff Shoobridge. “The council said, leave them as is, so we will leave them as is and move forward.”
The second item discussed an update to the city’s travel reimbursement policy. “The second item, again, is just a housekeeping item. The GSA, the federal government, sets limits every year on how much travel expenses you can get reimbursed. Primarily for meals,” says Shoobridge. “Staff will write up the resolution, and we will be changing that so that in the future it will be per GSA Guidelines and according to the Regional costs that are in place for the Federal Government,” Shoobridge says the city will adopt those guidelines by reference. “What that means is, by reference, if the federal government changes it, ours automatically changes to match it,” says Shoobridge. “We don’t have to address it every year to make the changes, it will just automatically change.”
The final discussion item for Monday’s Ways and Means meeting was developing a policy that any funds allocated or reserved for any grant applied for be fully secured and fully identified before approval to move forward. The idea was to ensure that if the city was applying for a grant, funds were not being promised that were not available. “We are just going to have a standard operating procedure so that we can make sure that we’re keeping track of when we have grants coming forward; if we have matching funds, we want a methodology in place to track them. To track how much money we have set aside for each grant,” says Shoobridge. “We don’t want to accidentally spend money twice.” Shoobridge likened such a situation to writing a check from your checkbook, forgetting to put it in your register, and then writing it again. It can be painful, and the city cannot afford to have this happen.
