One of the standard beats to the annual life cycle of the district—along with filing the annual Financial Plan—is the filing of the district’s annual Statement of Financial Information, or SOFI.
Typically, these are supposed to be filed by June 30 this year, but with the district losing it’s Chief Financial Officer earlier in the year, they were unable to meet that deadline.
The district has since employed a contractor to do the district finances, and so council has now been able to look at the SOFI report and pass it.
However, the mayor is worried that next year’s SOFI might also be late. The district’s current finance contractor attended the meeting via Zoom and was able to provide some assurance to the mayor, though due the audio not being linked up to the live stream, what he said was mostly unintelligible.
There’s always interesting nuggets of information to be found in the SOFI (like: did you know the district still has about $2000 in a separate account from an Alaska Snowmobile Ride back in 1992. “The District of Tumbler Ridge administers the Alaska Challenge Snowmobile Safari ’92 account funds on behalf of the Ridge Riders Snowmobile Club. The fund was created by excess revenue generated by the Alaska Challenge ride in 1992, organized by the Ridge Riders Snowmobile Club and the district. The fund is to be used to pay for groomer repairs and maintenance.”
In 2024, the district paid council $119,142.12—of which $32,172.66 was paid to the mayor, $14,762.41 to councillors Norbury and Dusseault and $14,361.16 to all the other councillors.
Council also received $73,661.06 for expenses incurred as part of doing their jobs, mostly for travel.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
