Most likely Baa1/Baa2 · ~72% investment grade · ~20% chance of no rating. How a GO rating is built, ICCSD scored factor-by-factor, and the probability spread.
Open the rating assessment →~660 source documents, the extraction pipeline, the canonical data tables, and the analysis reports behind this forecast — all reproducible from code.
Jump to contents →This is a transparent, source-traced cash forecast for the Iowa City Community School District General Fund, built by extracting figures from the district’s own board packets, audited financial reports, and Iowa state filings. The picture: ICCSD is solvent but structurally tight — running operating deficits, holding razor-thin reserves, and rolling short-term debt to stay liquid.
General Fund solvency
Solvency ratio = unrestricted (assigned + unassigned) GF fund balance ÷ (revenue − AEA flow-through), the metric in board policy 701.5R1. Base case below is reconciled to PFM’s own 7-year cash-flow model.
| Fiscal year | Solvency (base) | vs. board target |
|---|---|---|
| FY2024 (CAR) | 7.49% | below 10–15% target |
| FY2025 (est.) | 4.09% | below 5% floor |
| FY2026 | 0.50% | far below floor |
| FY2027 | 1.18% | below floor |
| FY2028 | 2.41% | below floor |
| FY2029 | 3.52% | below floor |
PFM projects ~$225M of FY2026 spending (vs. the $212M budget) — a ~$6M operating deficit — so solvency sits near zero in FY2026 and stays below the 5% floor every year through FY2029. Full forecast & scenario bands →
Spending authority & peers
The Unspent Authorized Budget (UAB) ratio is how much legal spending room is left at year end. ICCSD’s is the thinnest of any large Iowa district.
| Metric | Value | |
|---|---|---|
| FY2025 UAB ratio | 2.31% | last of 15 large Iowa districts (peer median ~16%) |
| FY2026 UAB (est.) | ~−1.4% | at or beyond the legal spending limit |
| Board target | 5–10% | missed every year since FY2020 |
KPI scorecard & peer benchmarking →
Cash & the warrant treadmill
The district collects property tax in two waves (October, April), so cash draws down in between. On operating cash alone the General Fund goes negative in September 2026. A $25M revenue anticipation warrant bridges that trough — but it is repaid ~$26.5M in spring 2027, leaving cash at only ~$0.4M by June 2027 (insufficient for July payroll), which is why a second ~$10M warrant is already planned for FY2027. The warrants manage liquidity; they do not fix the solvency gap. Monthly liquidity forecast →
Repository contents
Everything here is reproducible from the ICCSD Forecasting repository. An auditable pipeline turns source PDFs into canonical data and forecasts:
- Source documents (
data/raw/) — ~660 public records: 14 board-meeting packets (Jan–Jun 2026), audited ACFRs (FY2020–2023), Iowa DOM filings, and peer-district audits. - Inventory (
data/extracted/) — every document hashed, classified, and deduplicated, with data-quality flags. - Canonical data (
data/normalized/) — cash balances, receipts & disbursements, monthly actuals, the GF forecast, KPI scorecard, interfund loans, and known events. - Pipeline (
scripts/) — inventory → extractors → analysis → this site, covered by an automated test suite. - Reports (
docs/) — the analyses below, also published as this site.
The analysis reports
- Financial-KPI scorecard — metrics vs. targets & peers
- Source-trace report — every scorecard, forecast & liquidity number traced to its primary source & formula
- General Fund forecast (FY2026–FY2029) — solvency & UAB, PFM-reconciled
- Monthly liquidity forecast — cash through June 2027 with the warrant package
- Hypothetical 2028 Moody’s GO rating — methodology, scoring & probabilities
- Board-materials triage — which board documents feed the forecast