The Whistler Podcast

Episode 5: Taking the mystery out of the municipal budget (with Carlee Price)

December 18, 2019 Mayor Jack Crompton with special guest RMOW Director of Finance Carlee Price Season 1 Episode 5
The Whistler Podcast
Episode 5: Taking the mystery out of the municipal budget (with Carlee Price)
Show Notes Transcript

This week’s guest is Carlee Price, the RMOW’s Director of Finance. The Director of Finance acts as the Chief Financial Officer and is responsible for directing and overseeing the municipal financial operations including accounting, treasury services, fiscal planning, financial processes and reporting, asset management, procurement, revenue and customer service. Mayor Crompton and Carlee talk about Carlee’s past work experience, her passion for Whistler and the duo take the mystery out of the municipal budgeting process.

Narrarator:   0:02
The Whistler Podcast. Candid conversations about everything Whistler. With host, Mayor Jack Crompton.

Mayor Crompton:   0:09
Hello everyone, welcome to episode five of The Whistler Podcast. Thanks for joining us. I'm Mayor Jack Crompton. I would like to first acknowledge, as we always do, that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Lil'wat Nation and the Squamish Nation. I also want to thank Mountain FM for hosting us here in this glass case of beauty in the heart of the Village at their studio. Ah, it's it's nice to be able to come in here and sit down and have interesting conversations rather than having to think through how we actually put on a podcast every week, so grateful to them for hosting us here today. We are pleased–I am pleased to have Carlee Price with us. Carlee started at the RMOW in 2018 as the Director of Finance. The Director of Finance acts as the chief financial officer for the RMOW and is responsible for directing and overseeing the municipal financial operations, including accounting, treasury services, fiscal planning, financial processes and reporting, asset management, procurement–I'm getting tired Carlee– procurement, revenue and customer service. That is a tremendous amount of work. Welcome. What are all those things?

Carlee Price:   1:25
Right. Well, thanks for having me first of all. And that that lengthy list, these are actually all activities related to the money flows in the community. So all the folks in town pay taxes either through rent or through their direct property tax bill. And it's our responsibility as members of the Finance team at the RMOW to dispatch that money correctly and in the way that the community wants. So there's a lot involved in that, which is the list that you just noted, but it's it's pretty simple in its core.

Mayor Crompton:   1:52
Okay, Um So Whistler, how did you find yourself here? Why Whistler and not somewhere else?

Carlee Price:   1:59
So I grew up in Calgary and came to UBC for my undergraduate degree, which is how I discovered Whistler. And I distinctly remember the first time I came up and taking what was then the Wizard Chair, thinking that was the top of the mountain, carrying on up the Solar Coaster in thinking that was the top and just being amazed by the size and scale of what had been built here. So I stuck around for those four years went away, built a career and ultimately came back in 2018.

Mayor Crompton:   2:27
Well, I look forward to talking in the future at the end of this, uh, podcast today about the budget process and a little bit about what brings you here. But before we do that, one thing that's close to your ah, well is in the middle of your department, is the Community Enrichment Program grants, which we had our report backs from them it last night at Council. And I want to read out the community groups who ah, received finances from the municipality, but then also just acknowledge the amount of work they do because it's just incredible what the community groups in this place deliver for our community. So, AWARE, um Whistler Naturalists, Community Foundation of Whistler, Ecole La Passerelle, Howe Sound Women's Center. How, uh, Sea to Sky Community Services, Whistler Community Services, Whistler Learning Center, Whistler Mature Action Committee, Whistler Waldorf Society, Zero Ceiling, BC Luge. Whistler Adaptive Sports. Whistler Blackcomb Freestyle Club, Whistler Gymnastics Club, Whistler Mountain Ski Club Whistler Nordic ski Club., Whistler Sailing Association, Whistler Sea Wolves Swim Club, Whistler Skating Club, Whistler Sport legacies, Whistler Tennis Association,  Whistler Youth Soccer, the Point Artist Run Studio, Whistler Singers, Whistler Valley Quilters Guild, Whistler Writing Society, Whistler Secondary School Scholarships. It's a long list.  

Carlee Price:   3:51
Amazing.  

Mayor Crompton:   3:51
Yeah, and the work they do is just critical in building community.

Carlee Price:   3:55
Well, and it's so broad. Think of the quilters and the Swim Club and the gymnastics. They're all making their mark in a different way, but I think it's I think it's impressive what they do and the number of people they reach in the community.

Mayor Crompton:   4:07
Yeah, yeah, quilters is my favorite one. Yeah, I'm always struck. They, they used to only apply for, like, $250 each time and we always sort of thought, isn't that....they're way up now? A thousands dollars. Imagine the kind of quilts they can pull off of with$1000. So in other news, we're getting into the winter. This will be your first winter living inWhistler.  

Mayor Crompton:   4:31
I was here for nine months when my husband was overseas. He served in the military for 11 years, so I did spend some time. But this is my first stint as a full-time permanent resident. It's very exciting.

Mayor Crompton:   4:43
So did all of the the lights going up on trees shock you a bit or was that expected?

Carlee Price:   4:48
I've seen, I've seen, I've seen the Village lit up for the holidays, and it's one of my favorite parts. But being in it and seeing actually the effort that goes into hanging there were something like 350,000 bulbs in the Village, does that sound right?

Mayor Crompton:   5:01
Yes, it's, it's incredible. They start going up, you know, a month and half after they all come down. A constant, ah, labor of love for our community putting all those bulbs up. But there's ah yeah, 350,000 bulbs in total and around 7000 bulbs on each tree. It's pretty incredible.

Carlee Price:   5:19
It's crazy and watching the Snow Zone over by Olympic Plaza–I don't know if anyone's been there–but but watching it grow at the early part of the season was was pretty cool too.

Carlee Price:   0:00
Skating, open daily–people can get out and do that Family Apres is also fun. When Whistler turns on, it really turns on, and then all of a sudden I think today is the day when the whole world shows up and all of a sudden were in the full swing of winter season, which is exciting. So, yeah, busy time.

Narrarator:   0:00
You were listening to The Whistler Podcast. Candid conversations on current events, local government, everything Whistler.

Mayor Crompton:   0:00
Okay, so that's what's happening in town. And, um, thank you for going through that with us. Tell me about your previous career. I find this transition so interesting. We met when you were, um, in your previous career, right?

Carlee Price:   0:00
That's right, yeah.

Mayor Crompton:   0:00


Mayor Crompton:   0:00
What was your previous career before you were running the finances for the way? What were you doing?

Carlee Price:   6:18
So I actually spent 17 years in investment management. So analyzing huge public companies as potentials for investment and then transitioned in 2012 to private equities. So I was working with early stage venture scale companies managing in helping them to understand their finances. So every business can be be viewed through the lens of numbers and oftentimes, working with those early founders who tend to be technical, and tend to be visionary, to be able to speak that language and to be able to plan, make their plans and really understand their companies from a pure financial viewpoint can be really, really helpful. So these are companies who did everything from consumer products to technology. You, yourself know quite a bit about running small, technologically-based companies and then through that, got to know more about how organizations incorporate this type of work into their day to day operations. So it was at a time that I came to the municipality.,I was working in Seattle. My husband had gotten a job up here, so it was the perfect opportunity for me to take my skill set and then apply it in a community that I loved, in a role that I necessarily hadn't done specifically before, but had the skill set to really dig my teeth into.

Mayor Crompton:   7:31
What's a venture stage company?

Carlee Price:   7:34
It's a start up.

Mayor Crompton:   7:35
OK, so, and so you would be investing venture capital...

Carlee Price:   7:40
Exactly .

Mayor Crompton:   7:41
...in a startup that would come and pitch their company to you. And you would decide whether the fund that you were representing would invest or not.

Carlee Price:   7:51
And also working with companies that I may not have invested in directly, but needed the sort of help either in an advisory capacity,  a board capacity, or I worked as a contract CFO as well. So a for-hire, part-time CFO and companies that aren't yet big enough to support a full time role can be very valuable as well.

Mayor Crompton:   8:10
And so when your fund would invest, would you then become on advisor or sit on a have a board seat as part of that?

Carlee Price:   8:20
Sometimes yes.

Mayor Crompton:   8:20
But sometimes no,

Carlee Price:   8:21
Sometimes no.

Mayor Crompton:   8:22
Okay, and that's part of the negotiation on whethere there is an investment or not.

Mayor Crompton:   8:24
Yeah, and it's part of the needs of the company as well. So one mistake that investors can make is always wanting to get their fingers in the pie. And there can be too many of those. And often times where there's a strong founding team, it could be problematic if you get too many outside people involved, because as an advisor, as a board member, you're not sufficiently up to speed to be making operational decisions. So it's important to let the executors execute. Let the advisors advise and know which of those two camps you live in.

Mayor Crompton:   8:57
Do you miss it?

Carlee Price:   8:58
Sometimes.  

Mayor Crompton:   8:59
What do you miss about?

Carlee Price:   9:01
The energy. So often times start-up founders are young, they're ambitious. They're hungry. You get all that, of course, in municipal finance, but the game is slower. We iterate less slowly at the municipal level, by design, compared to private industry. There are ups and downs, pluses and minuses to both. But I miss the excitement that comes from a founder making their first sale or hitting one million AR for the first time. It's really interesting, and it really is the engine of the economy. So being part of that was a lot of fun, and I do miss it. Having said that, municipal finance affects entire communities in a way that no single product can and having that platform and having the ability to reach into the community in that way is also really, really cool.

Mayor Crompton:   9:54
Last question about your previous career, um, is Seattle. I mean, I know Seattle from the perspective of Amazon or Microsoft is this place for massive corporations. Is it also home in the way you think about San Francisco for venture stage companies starting out?

Carlee Price:   10:14
Yeah.

Mayor Crompton:   10:14
It is increasing?

Carlee Price:   10:15
So the Bay Area's obviously the biggest startup hub in the entire country of America. But you see these regional hubs and I actually got my start in private equity in Austin, Texas, and you'll see these regional hubs that could be very valuable and very active but very specialist. So in Austin it was consumer products were the biggest startup category because of Whole Foods. Right? In Seattle, it was enterprise software because of Microsoft. And increasingly, it's cloud, AI and machine learning because of Amazon. So even though the Bay is sort of the heart of the startup community in the States, there are such interesting pockets of specialist startup capital and talent that every region has its own sort of area.

Mayor Crompton:   11:01
It's an interesting point that those smaller companies really gravitate towards where the larger companies are doing that work, and they become service companies. But then also, um, you know, innovation hubs. And I think that, as I've thought of our small software company in Whistler, one of the reasons that Whistler's a fit is because it's our company is focused on tourism. And it's a conversation I've had with a lot of people thinking of of startups in Whistler that this is a great place for a tourism startup. It's a difficult place to do other things, because the focus of this community is on delivering a world class tourism experience, so you just don't have the same supports that you would have in Austin around what was being delivered in Austin or San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, other places that are focused enough.

Carlee Price:   11:58
And I think when you when you think about the companies that have started up here and I'm doing really well like Prior snowboards, Powder Sock–the guys with recovers–even though there's not the infrastructure to really push that category of company forward, there's such deep talent and understanding of those markets. So how to build a good snowboard?Or where–what's the product that no one thought they needed that when you put it on your goggles, is just the coolest thing and you can sell it all over the world. This is the type of expertise that does exist in communities like Whistler, and can move forward even without that infrastructure and support, and allow people to to create products for the for the world that are that are different, unique.

Mayor Crompton:   12:40
Yeah, and the market is here to test.

Carlee Price:   12:42
Correct

Mayor Crompton:   12:43
Which is a which is a big deal. Okay, so moving on to your new role, what's been the biggest change for you and what's been the steepest learning curve as the Director of Finance?

Carlee Price:   12:55
Yes, definitely the accounting, which sounds strange because accounting, like math, is the same. But because public sector entities are non profit by design–so what that means is that every year our revenues are expenditures have to perfectly match–this is a fundamental difference versus the private sector, so we have reserve accounting in the public sphere that doesn't exist in private sector. We assign expenses to projects and operations, which doesn't really exist in the private sector, where things tend to just be expensed in year. We also have asset management planning that extends oftentimes over decades, which you would never see in the private sector. So I would say just the approach to how we account for cash flows and how we have to think about the life span of that cash is very different, and took a while to sort of get used to.

Mayor Crompton:   13:50
Yeah, and you've made changes very early in your time. You've moved–the budgeting process used to take until early May, um, before we would actually release our budget and and be in, or I guess complete the budget–and you've moved that whole process into the prior year, so that we are going into 2020 with a confirmed 2020 budget. What was that process like? Why did you do it?

Carlee Price:   14:18
Yes, so to be clear, this was a change that had been contemplated for years. It's tricky because, so much of what you planned for the coming year requires information about what's happening currently. So if you start that process earlier, you're sort of missing–so, for example, we started in August of this year–you're only eight months through the year, so you don't really know where your starting point is going to be in December. So that's one challenge. You also don't know what the rest of the region is doing, as far as tax increases, for example, and you do sort of want to be in line with your neighbors. So it was a change that makes sense for all the reasons you pointed out., but that is difficult for other reasons. We were able to succeed for a 2020 budge, because so many managers, department leads have been thinking about it for a long time. I had the opportunity and coming in new and already introducing an element of change that they could be something that that I moved over the finish line. And even though those who had come before me had long thought about it had long planned for it.

Mayor Crompton:   15:19
You did such a great job during the budget process of explaining taxes. I think we, um we focus on the percent tax increase, and that becomes all that we put our minds to and all that we talk about. But there's so much more depth around what taxation is, how the municipality is funded, and I thought that your slides were great. But your explanation of how is the municipality funded and what is taxation would be helpful. I think I'd like to hear it again.

Carlee Price:   15:53
And I will confess that for the first 15 years that I owned real property, I did not understand municipal taxes at all. It's a bill that most people, I think get and just pay without even looking at it. So, the simple fact that–what is it–42 per cent of your tax bill that, as a Whistler homeowner you receive goes to provincial entities? Didn't know that.

Mayor Crompton:   16:15
School District...

Carlee Price:   16:16
School District, hospital,  BCA–so so really understand it's a huge is probably the biggest bill that most people in this town would receive in a year and just understanding what the pieces of it are, and that that headline number–that 2.8 only applies to a small portion of the total amount of the bill.  And further, the 2.8% only applies to you, if your house appreciates exactly in line with community. It's, it's a really dynamic and complicated document that is got some big numbers on it but also achieves a lot in the community.

Mayor Crompton:   16:49
So what does a 2 per cent tax? 2.8 per cent, we are, we're proposing, or–we've actually passed–a 2.8 per cent tax increase this year. What does that number 2.8 per cent mean?

Carlee Price:   17:02
Yeah, so the 2.8 per cent applies to general municipal tax, which is, again a small portion of the total bill you'll receive. And the 2.8 per cent applies only if your property appreciates in line with the community as a whole. So, for example, the BC Assessment numbers have come out and for Whistler, single family residential units this year were assessed in a range of zero to plus 15 per cent. We'll have specific numbers when the individual assessments go out. But if your home, for example, went down in value, according to BC Assessment in 2019, you will pay substantially less than the 2.8 per cent increase. Your taxes might actually go down. And that speaks to the way we divide up the total required tax requisition among property owners in this community.

Mayor Crompton:   17:46
Mhm. So if we taxed $100 for the whole municipality last year, a 2.8 per cent tax increase means that we will tax $100...$102...

Carlee Price:   18:00
$100.80

Mayor Crompton:   18:00
$100.80. Thank you. Wow. See, my math is terrific.

Carlee Price:   18:04
And if you and I were the only property owners and your house went up in value and my house went down in value, I would pay less. So if we both paid $50 last year, you would probably pay $55 I'd pay $47.80 this year. So there's a lot of different factors that that exists between the announced 2.8% per centand what my personal property tax bill ultimately looks like.

Mayor Crompton:   18:26
I have a friend who's a city councillor in Vancouver, and they have a proposed 7 per cent  tax increase this year. And there's a lot of conversation about what that is. And, uh, her name is Christine Boyle. She's a city councillor in in City of Vancouver, and she released a Twitter threadwhere she went through what does that actually mean in real dollars? And that's also an interesting conversation. We talk about a 7 per cent tax increase in Vancouver. That sounds like a tremendous amount, she was saying it's $220, which is alot of money, but for the services that we receive, I think, as a community–snow clearing, roads, water, sewer–that that percentage increase when spoken of in real dollars, often contextualizes is it for me and makes me think, "okay, am I willing to pay an additional $75 this year for the services that I'm receiving?" And generally my answer to that question is, "yes". But it's funny. I don't– do you know why we only talk about it in terms of per cent tax increase?  

Carlee Price:   19:37
No idea. It sounds so strange. It's very strange to me, and I think it might come back to this idea of the value change and that the 2.8 per cent is the one piece that we all share in common.

Mayor Crompton:   19:48
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are reserves?

Carlee Price:   19:53
Ah, reserves–my favorite topic. So reserves are the pools of money that we necessarily set aside as a community to replace, repair and maintain our physical assets. So obviously there's a lot of assets in the community, everything from Meadow Park Sports Center, to Municipal Hall, to the Library. We have to ensure that the people who use those assets today will be able to fund their ultimate replacement down the road. So it's a meaningful amount of money, and there's a tremendous amount of planning that has to go into those reserves and ensuring that they're the right amount,  without being too large to care for all those physical things.

Mayor Crompton:   20:30
So savings for future...

Carlee Price:   20:33
Yeah, it's like a retirement savings account, almost.

Mayor Crompton:   20:37
Anything else that you think I should know, we should know about our municipal budget and just how the municipality spends money in this town?

Carlee Price:   20:49
Yeah, we always start when we construct the budget with what does the community expect and we talk often in the budget process about service levels. So service levels include things like, "How often do we pick up garbage in the Village? How often do you do snow clearing? How many instructors do we have on staff at Meadow Park?" And it really has to come up from the community as to what they expect us to do for them. From that basis, we can start to calculate how much that service delivery costs and that service delivery cost does, unfortunately, go up every year. So it is normal to expect some amount of tax increase. We do everything we can, including looking for areas within the budget where we may be able to drive costs lower and deliver that expected service in the most efficient possible way. So rather than thinking about taxes as an expense item, as you point out, it's important to think of all the great stuff you get for that. The trash pick up, the snow clearing, the lifeguards, the people in accounting who ensure that the asphalt pourers get paid on time. There's a lot of work that happens in this community, and taxes pay for a lot of it.

Mayor Crompton:   21:57
Yeah, yeah, we've been doing...I'm really excited about the work that you're doing, that the municipality's doing around asset–long term asset management? The idea that we are paying attention to replacement costs of what we own and how we should save for those and how we should fund them when those come up. And the work that's being done in our community about understanding the infrastructure we have, so that we can make those informed decisions is exciting work. And I didn't realize it's it's relatively innovative and new work in the municipal context that this isn't something that municipalities have done in the past. As you see, you know, stories across the country of bridges falling apart and stuff like that, that this sort of long term asset management planning, the work that you're doing, is going to allow us to make better informed decisions about how we save now to invest later, which is just so interesting.

Carlee Price:   22:56
Very exciting. And it's interesting to note that that part of the reason why it's so innovative now is that we didn't...the PSAB (Public Sector Accounting Board) didn't require accounting for assets until 2009, which is crazy. So if if anyone who worked in municipal finance before that point had no–aside from depreciation–had no sense of what the assets in their community were worth and reserves the reserves game at that point was much more guesswork. Now that we have a picture of assets, we've been able to build on that as a municipal finance community and start to think about long term replacement values in different ways and start to use data to drive those decisions in a much more comprehensive and understandable way. So it really started with the accounting for assets in 2009, which was obviously an enormous project for communities all across the country. And we will continue to build on that in the coming years. And there's some really innovative work going on right now.

Mayor Crompton:   23:48
What's PSAB?

Carlee Price:   23:49
The Public Sector Accounting Board. They tell us how to account for stuff. 

Mayor Crompton:   23:51
They tell you how to account for stuff. Um, Carly, where secret spots–where do you like to ski, where do you like to where if you're going to get a glass of wine or if you're going to go for a walk, tell us a secret.

Carlee Price:   24:05
I really like Riverside Trail. It's not secret.  

Mayor Crompton:   24:09
It's your secret. I mean, not everybody knows where Riverside Trail is.

Carlee Price:   24:12
I really like it down there, I think it's beautiful. I love the fact that you're walking right along the river, and that river is ferocious. So it's a real reminder that you're in nature. It's hard to not feel like you're not in nature in Whistler, but I really, really like that trail, and it's it's easy enough. A lot of stuff around here could be challenging, but...I'm a bit clumsy, so.

Mayor Crompton:   24:27
That's a good spot. I don't think you should understate that. You should have said "Riverside Trail."

Mayor Crompton:   24:35
Riverside trail is my secret, it's my jam.

Mayor Crompton:   24:38
Riverside Trail is Carlee Price's jam. Thank you. That was fascinating. I think your your previous work is so interesting. And I think the work that you're doing right now is so interesting. And thank you on behalf of our community for paying attention to the dollars and cents and and and how we deliver services and and manage the assets we have. It's it's important work. And I'm grateful for it. We're grateful for it.

Carlee Price:   25:05
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Mayor Crompton:   25:07
So you have been listening to The Whistler Podcast. Another thank you to Mountain FM for hosting us here in the Whistlerstudio. Thanks for listening. I'm Jack Crompton. Go get some snow. I will talk to you next time.

Narrarator:   25:21
You've been listening to The Whistler Podcast. Candid conversations about everything Whistler. To find out more about The Whistler Podcast, visit whistler.ca/WhistlerPodcast.