Moody’s Upgrades Glen Cove’s Financial Rating

Moody’s Investors Service released its latest financial evaluation of Glen Cove and upgraded the City’s rating from Baa2 from a Baa3.

Moody’s is a provider of credit ratings, research and risk analysis. The company maintained the City’s outlook as positive.

“This upgrade for the City of Glen Cove independently validates the sound financial practices my administration has implemented to pay down our debt and grow our revenue without burdening our tax payers,” Mayor Reggie Spinello said in a press release. “We have been very effective in stabilizing our taxes, managing our expenses and significantly reducing our debt by millions of dollars while continuing to provide the same quality services our residents expect and deserve.”

The City says the following strengths were highlighted by Moody’s:

• Improved budgeting practices led to operating surpluses in fiscal 2015 and 2016.
• Elimination of total deficit fund balance position across operating funds at the end of fiscal 2016 based on unaudited results
• Waterfront development expected to stimulate tax base growth and economic activity goring forward
• Large and diverse tax base with high wealth levels.

The City attributed the outlook to maintaining balanced operations with modest increases. Spinello credited the improved rating to the Garvies Point project.

“Another factor that contributed to our upgrade was the success of the bond offering which provided the necessary funds to complete critical infrastructure work required by the city for the Waterfront project,” Spinello said. “With the city obtaining over $100 million dollars with no cost or obligation for repayment by our taxpayers we were able to secure the money without increasing our debt. If not for the waterfront project and its viability as an economic engine for the city, the burden would have been placed on our taxpayers to repay the loans and that could have increased our taxes tremendously.”

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