Wood River City Council Meeting
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WOOD RIVER – At the Jan. 5, 2026 Wood River City Council meeting, Trisha Shrewsberry of CJ Schlosser & Company LLC presented a few highlights of the audit report for the city’s past fiscal year ending April 30, 2025.
The city received an “unmodified opinion,” sometimes known as a “clean” audit, with a few notable items given major projects completed in recent years.
“You guys received an unmodified opinion again this year – it just meant no significant deficiencies, no material weaknesses, nothing of concern that we found during our audit procedures,” Shrewsberry said. “We were able to compile the audit free from any kind of issues.”
Shrewsberry then gave City Council members an overview and comparison of the past five fiscal years. She said the Wood River Rec Center represented a large share of “capital outlay expenditures” from that time period.
“Three years ago when you were starting the Rec Center, you had a huge, almost $10 million expense there [and] $6 million in 2024 until you finished that project,” she said. “That was the majority of both of those years of expenditures related to capital outlay.”
She noted last year’s capital outlay expenditures totaled just $3.6 million, which mostly consisted of equipment purchases, an addition to the Fire Department building, sidewalks, parks improvements, and other projects.
The biggest change over prior years she noted was in the city’s amount of governmental “net profit,” technically known as “excess of receipts over disbursements.” The past fiscal year’s net profit in governmental funds totaled $365,962, which was higher than recent years prior given the lack of capital expenditures on the Rec Center and other large projects in 2025.
Charges for water, sewer, and other related services increased by about $350,000 over the past fiscal year, though Shrewsberry noted expenditures also rose due to general increases in payroll and other costs. She said this marks a slightly lower “net profit” for the city on these revenue sources compared to prior years.
Investment income on the city’s Police and Fire Department pensions increased by about 10% over last year, marking a total of over $1.8 million generated in 2025 between the two pension funds compared to 1.6 million last year. Shrewsberry said benefits for pensioners, including those that retired this year, also increased over years past.
A full recording of the Jan. 5, 2025 Wood River City Council meeting is available at the top of this story or on Riverbender.com/video.
