Riverside’s village board has directed staff to plan to transfer about $780,000 from the $2 million of the village’s surplus risk management reserves at the end of the year to fund capital projects planned for 2026. The village will not transfer the money until the end of 2025, after the board will reevaluate the exact costs that need to be covered next year.
The planned projects include $92,000 in contractual spending for police gear and supplies, about $422,500 for critical replacements for equipment at or beyond its end of life across departments and $265,200 to replace equipment that is deteriorating and create new initiatives for community development.
“The village has options and sufficient resources to fund these projects. I want to be very clear: There is not a deficit. We are prioritizing what projects the board plans to complete this year,” said Yvette Zavala, Riverside’s finance director, at the board’s Aug. 7 meeting.
At the meeting, Zavala presented three options to trustees for the village to plan to cover the costs next year. The village could transfer the full $780,000 from its surplus reserves held at the Intergovernmental Risk Management Agency (IRMA), it could transfer about $480,000 from IRMA and cover the remaining $300,000 with the estimated end-of-year surplus in Riverside’s general fund, or it could leave the money with IRMA and defer the projects to future years, she said.
Zavala said she did not recommend deferring the costs to a future year.
“Costs are incurred even when an item is not purchased. Some of these items have been deferred from prior years, so these costs have doubled” since then, she said.
For example, she said, while it would cost the village $85,000 to replace a fire department pickup truck in critical condition next year, it would still cost Riverside about $8,000 not to replace it. That expense would come from the costs of maintaining the truck, projected inflation in the price of the future replacement vehicle and the decrease in the value of the truck as salvage material as it continues to be used and deteriorate.
“All of these projects are just a plan,” Zavala said. “When they actually come to fruition, they are brought to the board again for review and approval of a purchase order if they [cost] $25,000 or more.”
As of 2025, Riverside’s IRMA reserves are worth just under $2 million, meaning the village has more than enough money saved to cover the costs of the planned projects. Zavala said Riverside also has about $2.5 million in a committed savings account, about three months’ worth of the village’s operating budget compared to the best practice of keeping two months’ worth.
Zavala said the nearly $300,000 general fund surplus is only an estimate, as the actual surplus cannot be determined until the end of the year after Riverside has made every purchase for 2025.
Trustee Jill Mateo pointed out that Riverside’s IRMA reserves have historically had a higher interest rate than the village’s savings account and asked whether it would be prudent to keep as much of the reserves in place as possible.
“We have been seeing these large annual increases [in IRMA], but that’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s good, and sometimes it’s not,” Zavala said. “Right now, while it is good, we do have the option of withdrawing, and we don’t know until the end of the year what it’s going to look like. It might have a loss this year; we don’t know that, so if we do withdraw, we lower that risk.”
She added that extra savings in the village’s general fund surplus, while generating less interest than those savings in IRMA, would improve Riverside’s chances of receiving bonds if it should apply for them.
Ultimately, the board agreed to have staff plan to withdraw the full amount of nearly $780,000 at the end of the year.
“It was my understanding that one of the reasons why we built up this IRMA fund was for situations like this. We have this money to be able to move forward with things,” Trustee Elizabeth Kos said. “It’s not that we’re dipping into something that we don’t want to or it’s ill-advised to dip into; we’re dipping into something that we saved for this purpose.”
