Taylor’s Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Wood is not usually too giddy, but lately people have been calling him that. “I’m probably the opposite of giddy,” said the Michigan native, who has been serving as Taylor’s CFO since March of 2019. “That was a comment that was made during the budgeting process. Normally, I’m pretty straitlaced and serious, you know, a take-care-of-business type of guy.”
Wood shared this during the Oct. 10 edition of Taylor Talk with Taylor Press Area Editor Jason Hennington, with whom he discussed, among other things, the duties of his job, why utility bills are higher in Taylor, and what makes him giddy.
Wood said a big part of the chief financial officer’s job is to oversee the city’s budget, a nine-month process, which involves working together with the city manager, all the city’s departments and the city council to determine what the needs are and how much money will be available through taxes and other sources of revenue.
“My role is to take all of those departmental budgets, put them together into a budget document along with the revenues that I’ve projected, and then work with council to make sure that we’re meeting the goals that council has established in the budget,” Wood said. “If we have excess revenues during the budgeting process, then we look at some of those special requests that the departments have requested whether it be additional personnel or additional equipment, or enhanced programming, and then we look to see how much revenues we have to fund those programs.”
During the interview, Wood pointed to Taylor’s aging infrastructure as a reason for the city’s high utility bills.
“When you look at utility rates, each city looks at their specific system, and they have to set rates to generate the revenues needed to support their system,” Wood said. “And every city is different.”
As an example, Wood shared that most of the infrastructure in Hutto, which has lower rates, is brand new, while Taylor’s is many decades old and in more need of maintenance.
“Unlike some of the other cities that have seen explosive growth in the last 20 years, we haven’t seen that in the city of Taylor,” Wood said. “We have a larger core infrastructure, in particularly water and sewer, that is older, needs replacing, needs a lot of repair and maintenance and upkeep.” But Wood said the city council and staff are aware that their rates are higher and are taking proactive steps to address the problem. And in the meantime, Wood is pleased with the progress being made through the 2022-23 budget.
“One of the highlights of this year’s budget was that we had the ability, through bond funding and through grant funding, and through a zero percent loan, to put together $48 million dollars in capital improvements that we’re going to do in the city,” Wood said. “There’s hundreds of millions of dollars worth of work that needs to be done in the city’s infrastructure, and we’re limited on the resources, and to be able to do that … everything just came together this year to where we were able to put together a $48 million capital improvement project, the largest in the history of the city.”
Hence the reason for Wood’s giddiness. “It was an opportunity to put all that together and do a lot for the city that we’ve been talking about wanting to do and just haven’t had the funds available to do,” Wood said. “So, I think I was probably a little bit excited when we were talking about that during the budget process, and somebody commented that I was giddy. It’s really more of an inside joke. I’m really not a giddy person.”
Taylor Talk can be seen live on the second Monday of the month at noon at www.facebook. com/GoTaylorTx/. All previous episodes are available on the Taylor Press Facebook page as well.
