"It is the County’s goal to ensure current year revenues are sufficient to fund current year expenditures without the use of non-recurring revenues. However, non-recurring and unbudgeted areas of funding used to finance expenditures were as follows". This boilerplate language appears every year in the County Controller’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) under the section "Relevant Financial Policies" as a way of saying that the County has a goal to live within its budgeted means but cannot.
Since the 2007 CAFR-covering the 2007 fiscal year, which for the County runs on a calendar basis-through the newly released report covering 2011, the County has used the following amounts of non-recurring revenues: $41.8 million, $24.7 million, $35.2 million, $48.9 million, and $45.6 million. The sources of the revenues varied-gaming money, sales of property, state funds, etc. That adds up to the nearly $200 million referenced by the County Controller in the conference releasing the new CAFR.
Recent uses of non-recurring revenue came about even though the previous County Executive pledged in September of 2009 that "the county’s long-standing practice of balancing its finances with one-time revenue sources is a thing of the past." The $50 million deficit that the former County Controller predicted in April of 2009 that would surface in 2012 was tempered, supposedly, with the 1 mill tax increase passed by County Council at the end of 2011. Whether the County avoids using non-recurring revenue this year will become clear upon the release of the 2012 CAFR.