Financing Strategy Services

The vendor required to provide financing strategy services for include:
- Gap analysis
•    The requirement for expanding our professional staff as we expand our service delivery.
•    Being fully financed, meaning annual expenses do not exceed forecasted available tax levy and alternate funding. 
•    Requiring annual budget approval of pre-determined budget increases. 
•    Costing all known capital requirements associated with implementing growth facilities and terminal infrastructure, including contingencies. 
•    Operating costs of all the capital requirements. 
•    Upfront and maintenance costs of all technology requirements. 
•    A dedicated or exclusive transit reserve account strategy, or running balance. 
•    Operational challenges that may have future budget impacts, such as a bus fleet that is well beyond its optimal service life, challenges servicing northern communities and others that need to be addressed.
•    Funding sources, ensuring no overreliance on external funding, and including natural pivot points and backup strategy for if funding does not materialize. 
•    Establishing a mechanism for annual forecast review and revision due to a lack of funding, or other key decision points. 
•    Ensuring that service hour growth is responsible and feasible given needs across the business. 
•    Other considerations that may be identified through gap analysis.
- Updated 10-year service hour and capital forecasts
•    Finance, service design, maintenance, and infrastructure teams, the consultant will document 2027-2032 forecasts for service hour increases (1) and capital infrastructure (2) needed including terminals, new garages, bus stops, technology, and vehicles, among other key capital considerations.
•    Be editable, allowing for deferrals or adjustments to service hour, electrification scenarios or capital plans, which will directly impact the service and financing strategy model 
•    Track and manage all capital projects based on user inputs (including cost estimates, asset life cycles and priority levels) 
•    Project annual and long-term budget requirements, highlight funding gaps and support scenario analysis 
•    Roll forward annually, as informed by annual budgets, and long-term planning. 
•    Include a summary and dashboard for senior management reporting
- Expense and fare revenue model
•    A user-friendly modelling tool that can be easily updated by regional staff after the conclusion of the project.
•    Any updates to one input must make automatic changes to other fields, as applicable. 
•    The model must include the ability to allow for different constraints, meaning other inputs will update automatically based on factors selected by agency.
•    These constraints include, financial, total bus fleet, external funding, maintenance capacity (including service, fueling, electric vehicle charging, and storage), operator capacity, system capacity, service hours, fare revenues, GHG emissions and any others.
•    The ability to update future years, based on past and current actuals.