City of Sturgeon Bay Receives ‘Clean Audit’ for 2022

A view of Sturgeon Bay’s waterfront. File photo.

The City of Sturgeon Bay received good news in the audit conducted of its finances for 2022 by the accounting firm Wipfli.

Prior to the Sturgeon Bay Common Council accepting the audit report and placing it on file during its May 2 meeting, Brian Anderson of Wipfli summarized the findings of the report to the council via Zoom.

“Once again, a very clean audit,” he said. “I feel the city’s in a fairly good financial position.”

City treasurer/finance director Val Clarizio commented on the audit reporting the city having increases last year in the general fund balance of around $535,000 and the capital improvement fund balance of approximately $871,000.

“But when you look at this audit, some of those items that we purchased in the capital budget haven’t arrived yet,” she said. “So, I suspect that $871,000 fund balance [increase] in capital [improvement funds] will dwindle down, but that was by design. It was for items that we had budgeted in 2022 but just haven’t arrived yet due to, I guess, some manufacturing problems.”

The respective fund balances reported at the end of 2022 were $6,903,282 in the general fund and $2,902,112 for capital improvements.

Mayor David Ward pointed out that the audit report also shows the city’s long-term debt obligation went down by about $1.3 million last year.

“The key factor for this decrease was scheduled retirement debt in the general/capital fund and [Tax Increment Districts], net of the new debt service payments scheduled for capital purchases and projects,” the report stated.

At the end of 2022, the city’s total outstanding debt was $25,117,288.