ST. CLAIRSVILLE — St. Clairsville Finance Director Annette Nichols is tasked with ensuring the city of St. Clairsville is financially stable.

Nichols has roughly 30 years of experience working in finance and is responsible for creating the city’s budget. She works to create a temporary budget around November, then a permanent budget that is required to be completed by March. In July, she creates a third budget that is required by Belmont County.

“I work with Scott (Harvey), the director of Public Service, he and I work with the department heads,” Nichols said. “They kind of make their wish list and we see what we can make happen for the city with the budget.”

She added that she spends roughly three weeks working on each version of the budget she creates before presenting it to St. Clairsville City Council.

“The budget basically is based on two things. It’s based on the cash carryover, what money we have left over from last year, and it’s divided into several funds. Each department has its own fund, and then under each fund are several line items. So we have to fill all of those in, but the budget can only be based on the cash carryover and anticipated revenue that’s coming in for the following year. And then we’re actually overseen by the county, so anything we do financially, it goes to the county auditor’s office, and they oversee that money for us,” Nichols said.

She added that the city’s main fund is the general fund. That money comes from income taxes, property taxes and local government funds.

“Some of it comes from through the state of Ohio and from the county, and the income tax is split between 50% to the general fund and then we have a Permanent Improvement Fund, which gets the other 50%, and that’s for projects that we don’t really have the money in the other accounts to fund. So it’s for special capital projects,” she said. “So the general fund money can be used on anything within the city. And then we have the street fund. It’s another main fund that’s funded mostly by the general fund. We do collect money for gas taxes and license taxes. So they don’t actually collect a lot of money. They’re funded through the general fund a lot of their money.”

She added that the same goes for the St. Clairsville Recreation Center. According to Nichols, the rec center only receives money from rentals, basketball, baseball and softball fees, which she said isn’t enough for the center to be self-sufficient.

“The police fund is funded from several levies that are like police levies. They get some of their money from there, plus some from the general fund, too. And the general fund actually has a levy fund that’s collected from taxes, too,” she said, “The other three funds are called enterprise funds — water, sewer, and electric, which we’re unique because we have our own electric department. So that money out of those three funds can only be used for those projects, water, sewer and electric.

“Then we have a capital project line item, which is funded from the collections and a debt service that pays the loans, and they are each sufficient within themselves,” Nichols said.

Although Nichols has roughly 30 years of experience in finance, she has only been the St. Clairsville finance director since 2020.

“When I came in, in 2020, COVID started right when I got here. So we kept expenditures down because we couldn’t get materials and things like that,” she said. “So for a few years, we were kind of low-key on spending, so now, with our departments and our supervisors, we’re trying to do extra maintenance, like stuff that hasn’t been done for several years.”

In those 30 years, Nichols has seen more cities and counties adapting to the Uniform Accounting Network, which is an accounting system provided to fiscal directors by the state of Ohio.

“It’s a Cadillac system. I mean, I’ve worked with other systems, like older systems, but basically, because it’s from the state it’s set up to keep you within the rules and the guidelines of your spending,” she noted. “It’s set up to keep you within the rules and the guidelines of your spending so whatever money I put in there, it keeps cash balances and things like that so we can’t do anything wrong.”

She added that the UAN is her guideline to make sure she is doing everything right. She said that if she does make an incorrect entry, the UAN will flag it and explain what she did wrong so she can fix it.

When it comes to the future of the job, she is looking into ways that city employees can clock in and out on their mobile devices because the employees currently have to come to the department where they work to punch in and then go to wherever a waterline break or power outage is, which she believes is a waste of time.

She added that although the ability to clock in and out via mobile devices would be a time-saver, the applications that provide that service are expensive.