Finance
South Pasadena faces budget delays amid mounting tensions and financial concerns
The meeting was only one-third of the way through, but the exasperation in the air was palpable.
“There’s a level of frustration that’s happening throughout the room, and I don’t mean just up here, I think it’s everybody,” said South Pasadena Councilmember Janet Braun, who serves as the City Council’s liaison to the city’s Finance Commission.
Braun’s comments at this week’s Finance Commission meeting came as tensions continue to mount over the proposed fiscal year ’24-’25 budget, which the South Pasadena City Council is set to adopt next Wednesday, July 31.
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Despite efforts to finalize the financial document, its adoption has already been delayed by about a month after city officials expressed concerns about discrepancies on June 27.
While the Finance Commission meetings are meant to solve these issues, recent events suggest the budget may face further delays, adding to uncertainties about the city’s financial outlook after it narrowly avoided a $3.7 million deficit.
“Based on an impasse between the Finance Commission and the Finance Director during its two commission meetings on July 16th and July 23rd, I am not sure if the Finance Director can close the gap,” Mayor Evelyn Zneimer said in an email on Thursday, July 25.
Zneimer expressed concerns about the “true numbers of the revenues and expenditures,” noting that the Finance Department has not reconciled the city’s monthly bank statements since February 2024.
“If the Council is not satisfied with the explanation from the Finance Director and the Finance Commission does not recommend adoption, then we might have to postpone the July 31st meeting to the next regular council meeting,” she said.
South Pasadena Finance Director John Downs announced his retirement in April but was brought back on a temporary basis to finalize the FY 24-25 budget, city officials said.
When reached by the phone on Thursday, July 25, Downs, citing a busy schedule, declined the interview at the time. However, during the Tuesday, July 23, Finance Commission meeting, Downs defended his approach. He also said the staff will present an updated budget document to the City Council next week.
“That will be presented to both of you at the time,” he told the commissioners. “Everyone here has received a copy of the punch list, so everybody has a list of the punch list, those things will be incorporated into the document.”
But the commissioners expressed concerns that they won’t have a copy of the budget report before next week’s meeting.
“My assumption was that these working sessions last week and this week would be included in a revised document. John was working under a different set of assumptions. I’m glad it finally came out,” Finance Commission Chair Peter Giulioni Jr. said.
According to the proposed FY 24-25 budget, as of July 1, 2024, the general fund balance is estimated to be $22 million. For FY 24-25, the city expects to receive $41.2 million in revenue and spend $39.9 million.
South Pasadena has faced a tumultuous year, beginning with budgetary missteps that included a projected $3.7 million deficit.
During a joint City Council and Finance Commission meeting on Feb. 21, a third-party consultant, NHA Advisors, LLC, estimated that the city’s expenses would outpace its general fund revenues over the next five years, with deficits ranging from $1.8 million this fiscal year to $3.9 million in FY 28-29.
In response to this dire forecast, Braun recommended forming an ad hoc committee “to address the immediate financial and operational situation.”
According to her, the city’s financial problems began even earlier with the City Council’s adoption of the FY 23-24 budget in June 2023, which included a $2 million deficit.
That budget was approved on the condition that the Finance Commission would work with staff to understand the negative fund balances and provide a five-year projection, she said. The City Council received this projection on Feb. 21, along with a mid-year budget report.
“Accompanying that report was the mid-year budget report, which projects not the $2 million deficit originally approved and on which the five-year projections were built, but maybe that is incorrect, I’ve learned,” Braun said. “But an actual deficit for the current year of $3.7 million. We have been delivered a financial nuclear bomb.”
She also criticized what she described as “the staff’s resistance to work with the Finance Commission over the past several months, despite the direction from the City Council last June.”
Following Braun’s alarming assessment, the ad hoc committee was formed. It consisted of Zneimer, Braun, Giulioni, and Finance Commission Vice Chair Sheila Rossi.
However, this committee was nearly dissolved after complaints from former Finance Commissioner Ed Elsner, who argued that the committee violated Brown Act because its discussion and formation were not listed on the Feb. 21 meeting agenda.
During a meeting on March 20, Councilmember Jon Primuth argued that the committee “had a very strong political agenda.” Councimember Michael A. Cacciotti described the committee as “a duplicative body” and “a waste of time, a waste of our resources”.
The City Council subsequently voted 3-2 against reauthorizing the committee, with Primuth, Cacciotti and Councilmember Jack Donovan voting against reauthorizing, Zneimer and Braun voting in favor.
But public concern over the deficit projections grew, prompting the City Council to reinstate the committee on May 1. The panel decided that the committee would be resurrected after July 1, by which time the FY 24-25 would’ve been adopted.
Nevertheless, that plan also fell short.
While the City Council had hoped to adopt the FY 24-25 budget before the current fiscal year ends on June 30. However, during a June 27 meeting, the panel, citing discrepancies in the numbers in the financial report, voted to go with the Finance Commission’s recommendation to delay the budget adoption.
Instead, the panel approved a resolution of continuing appropriations, authorizing the city to use appropriations for ongoing projects for 60 days or until the adoption of the budget, whichever comes first.
Using continuing appropriations could lead to administrative inefficiencies, restricted financial management and uncertainty for long-term planning, according to a staff report. However, the pros of this method are that it could help avoid government shutdown, maintains the status quo and provides more time for budget negotiations.
According to a staff report, the proposed FY 24-25 budget is balanced and shows a projected surplus. In addition, the previously projected $3.7 million deficit was mitigated by the discovery of unused funds.
But there are several problems with the proposed budget, Rossi said in a recent interview.
“I don’t really have a lot of trust in the numbers that are in the budget, because we still haven’t received the third quarter financials,” she said. “They gave us the third quarter summary, but it turns out that they haven’t finished their bank reconciliations for February. “
Rossi also expressed concerns that the revenue projections in the proposed budget are overstated by $700,000 to $900,000 based on the projections from two third party consultants the city hired.
Meanwhile, the city has hired LSL finance consultants to help with back-office accounting and reconcile the bank statements, the mayor said.
“Hopefully LSL could clarify the true numbers so that by August 21, we might be able to adopt the budget subject to any conditions that the Council might impose,” she said. “But then I have the other four Councilmembers to weigh in on the situation and I don’t know where they stand. So everything will depend on how the meeting will go on July 31.”
The city has also been dealing with a string of staff departures, which culminated in the stepping down of former City Manager Arminé Chaparyan on June 24. She received a lump-sum severance benefit in the amount of $307,500, $1,727.10 of unused management leave and a cash payment for all properly accrued and unused vacation time.
On Friday, July 26, the City Council approved a resolution appointing Donald Penman to serve as interim manager. Penman previously served as city manager for the cites of Arcadia, San Fernando and Baldwin Park.
He will start on Monday, July 29.
Rossi said “nothing is at stake” if the City Council doesn’t passes the budget next week.
But one thing was expected: A long night.
“The best we can do is to create a punch list and that we all need to bring our pajamas and cots on the evening of the 31st, that it’s going to be an extraordinarily long evening, if we are going to ask the City Council to either reject or accept each line item that we’re discussing right now,” Giulioni said.
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Photographer: Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg
© 2025 Bloomberg Finance LP
Crypto has always traded on a different clock. Bitcoin does not close for weekends, liquidity does not pause for holidays, and leverage does not wait for clearing desks to reopen on Monday morning. For years, that difference helped separate crypto-native venues from regulated financial infrastructure.
That separation is narrowing. CME Group said its regulated cryptocurrency futures and options will be available for 24-hour, seven-day trading beginning May 29, pending regulatory review, with trading continuing on CME Globex except for a weekly maintenance window. The move is more than an operational extension. It is a sign that traditional finance is being pulled toward the market structure crypto normalized first.
The harder question is not whether institutions can trade crypto around the clock. They already can, through offshore venues, prime brokers, market makers, and liquidity providers. The harder question is whether regulated finance’s clearing, custody, surveillance, privacy, and risk systems can operate in markets where leverage, information, and volatility never really switch off.
Crypto’s 24/7 derivatives era is not simply making digital assets look more institutional. It is forcing traditional finance to become more continuous.
Derivatives are becoming crypto’s institutional layer
The center of gravity in crypto markets has been moving away from simple spot trading for years. Spot markets still matter, especially for retail flows, exchange liquidity, and ETF-related demand. But derivatives are where much of the institutional market now expresses risk, hedges exposure, prices volatility, and manages leverage.
That shift is visible in the data. CCData’s January 2026 Exchange Review reported combined centralized exchange volumes of $5.26 trillion, while spot trading accounted for $1.27 trillion. The implication is clear: derivatives represented the majority of centralized exchange activity that month.
This matters because derivatives do not just reflect price discovery. In crypto, they increasingly shape it. Futures, perpetual swaps, and options influence liquidity, funding rates, volatility expectations, and institutional positioning. When derivatives become the dominant venue for market expression, trading hours become less a convenience issue and more a structural one.
That is why CME’s move is significant. Regulated access is no longer just about listing a bitcoin or ether contract. It is about matching the operating rhythm of the asset itself.
CME also said client demand for digital asset risk management helped drive a record $3 trillion in notional cryptocurrency futures and options volume in 2025. That is not a fringe market asking for extended access. It is a regulated derivatives marketplace responding to institutional demand for more continuous risk management.
Continuous trading still runs into legacy settlement
The tension is that continuous execution does not automatically mean continuous settlement. CME’s model extends trading access, but it still preserves familiar institutional mechanics. Weekend and holiday trades are assigned the next business day’s trade date, and clearing, settlement and regulatory reporting continue to flow through the next business day framework.
That is the bridge traditional finance is trying to build: crypto-speed execution on top of regulated market infrastructure. It is a practical compromise, but also a revealing one. Crypto markets solved for continuous trading first and institutional controls second. Traditional finance is trying to do the reverse.
There are good reasons for that. Regulated derivatives markets cannot simply discard reporting obligations, margin discipline, risk controls, and clearing protocols. Their value proposition is precisely that institutions can trade within a transparent, supervised framework.
But always-on markets compress the time available to react. A move that happens on a Sunday morning can affect collateral needs, counterparty exposures, hedge ratios, and liquidity conditions before traditional workflows fully resume. In that environment, operational readiness becomes part of market structure.
The next competitive edge may not be who lists the product first. It may be who can monitor risk, margin exposure, custody flows, and compliance exceptions in real time without weakening the controls institutions rely on.
Transparency becomes a risk surface
Crypto’s always-on design also introduces a second challenge: information moves continuously too. Public blockchains make settlement visible, auditable, and difficult to falsify. That can reduce certain intermediary risks. But the same transparency can expose flows that businesses would normally treat as confidential.
“It does both simultaneously,” said Natalie Newson, Senior Blockchain Investigator at CertiK, when asked whether public blockchain transparency reduces systemic risk or creates new attack surfaces. “Settlement finality is also publicly auditable,” she said, but “front-running and MEV are persistent issues in blockchain.”
That duality is central to the institutional adoption question. Public auditability is useful when markets need trust in settlement. It is less straightforward when market participants reveal treasury movements, collateral positioning, payroll flows, or supplier payments in real time.
Newson framed the business risk directly. “If your treasury wallet is known, and on-chain, it eventually becomes known, counterparties, suppliers, and competitors can watch your liquidity position in real time,” she said.
For trading firms, that visibility can affect execution. For corporations, it can expose working capital strategy. For institutions, it can turn settlement infrastructure into a source of market intelligence for competitors. In a 24/7 derivatives environment, information leakage does not wait for office hours either.
This is where the conversation moves beyond cybersecurity. The issue is not just hacks, exploits, or smart contract vulnerabilities. It is whether an always-on financial system can protect commercially sensitive behavior while preserving the auditability that makes blockchain infrastructure useful in the first place.
Privacy is becoming part of market infrastructure
The early crypto argument treated transparency as a feature. That was true for open monetary networks and early DeFi systems, where public verification helped establish trust. But what works for a speculative or experimental market does not automatically work for enterprise finance.
“Transparency becomes a structural constraint the moment a business tries to use blockchain for real operations,” said Varun Kabra, Chief Growth Officer of Concordium. “Payroll, supplier contracts, treasury flows, pricing structures, these are not marketing data points.”
That is the institutional bottleneck hiding inside the 24/7 trading conversation. It is not enough for markets to stay open. The systems around those markets need ways to prove identity, authorization, eligibility, and compliance without exposing more information than necessary.
Kabra’s broader point is that the next phase of adoption depends on combining privacy with accountability. “The next phase of adoption won’t come from arguing with regulators,” he said. “It will come from building systems where privacy and accountability coexist by design.”
That logic is already moving beyond financial markets. Concordium’s partnership with the Danish Ice Hockey Union includes a Verified Fan Programme using zero-knowledge proofs and an Agentic Commerce initiative around verified AI agents, showing how users or automated agents could prove access rights or authorization without disclosing unnecessary personal data.
The sports example is not the point. The infrastructure pattern is. As markets become more automated and more continuous, identity and selective disclosure become part of the same control stack as margining, custody, and surveillance.
Traditional finance is learning to operate on crypto’s clock
The obvious reading of CME’s 24/7 move is that crypto is becoming more institutional. That is true, but incomplete. The more interesting reading is that traditional finance is beginning to adopt pieces of crypto-native market structure because client demand, volatility, and liquidity have already moved in that direction.
This does not mean regulated finance will become decentralized. It will not. Institutions still need clearinghouses, custodians, reporting systems, market surveillance, and legal accountability. What changes is the cadence. Risk systems that were designed around market closes and business-day workflows will need to function in a market where exposure changes continuously.
That transition will not happen all at once. Execution hours can expand faster than settlement systems. Trading access can move faster than compliance architecture. Liquidity can move faster than privacy standards. The result is a hybrid market structure: crypto assets trading on a crypto clock, through increasingly regulated venues, with traditional finance rebuilding its control layer around a more continuous environment.
For investors, this means crypto derivatives are becoming more than a trading product. They are becoming the test case for how legacy market infrastructure adapts to always-on finance.
The next phase of institutional crypto adoption will not be defined only by which assets get listed or which venues gain market share. It will be defined by whether the financial system can manage risk, identity, privacy, and settlement at the speed crypto markets already demand.
RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) — Families are navigating the already stressful college planning process, and a new set of financial grades is prompting many to look more closely at the stability of the schools they are considering.
Forbes’ annual financial report card for private, nonprofit colleges and universities is putting a spotlight on how well schools can manage their finances. The rankings are based on each institution’s ability to cover immediate expenses with cash on hand — a measure that is increasingly resonating with parents.
In the Triangle, the grades vary widely. Duke University received an A+, while Meredith College earned a B-. Shaw University was rated C-, and Saint Augustine’s University received a D.
For families, those grades are becoming an important part of the decision-making process, alongside academic and campus life.
“This college experience is much more than the books and the tuition,” Wake Forest parent Meranda Van Ningen said.
Van Ningen said a school’s financial condition is now a key factor as she — and many other parents — evaluate long-term value and security.
“We had to really lean in and ask the questions, make sure that we were getting the answers we appreciated,” she said. “They want us. They want our money to come in and to pay for that next year.”
She said the financial grades offer insight into how well schools can navigate economic challenges.
“Show that they can handle this tough, tough economy, to be honest, and that they know how to roll with it because campuses have good years and bad years as well,” Van Ningen said.
Financial planners say that shift in focus is well-founded, especially as some colleges across the country face financial strain or closure.
“A lot of smaller colleges are closing throughout the country,” said Gray Pendleton, president of Pendleton Financial. “I think it’s important to look at the financial health of the school.”
Experts say the added scrutiny reflects the high stakes of higher education, often one of the largest investments a family will make. Along with reviewing financial grades, they encourage families to thoroughly research institutions before committing.
They also stress the importance of early financial preparation to manage rising costs.
“Even like, $10 to $100 a month,” Pendleton said. “The NC 529 savings plan is great. And that’s an aggressive, age based plan. That’s a good opportunity.”
As financial grades draw more attention, families are increasingly weighing not just where students will thrive academically, but also which schools are best positioned to remain financially secure over the long term.
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Investors and analysts said the market was moving beyond the smaller hotel conversions that dominated the past two years, with more sizeable transactions expected as financing conditions improve, distressed sales accelerate, and buyers hunt for assets capable of generating stable income.
“This year and next year, there will be more sizeable transactions,” said Kavis Ip, CEO of Centaline Investment.
Unlike earlier student housing projects typically backed by smaller private investors, the Regal deal was structured with an equity partner and sized for eventual exit to institutional buyers such as insurers, sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms.
“We always wanted to do deals of this size,” Ip said. “Large institutional-grade assets create a completely different buyer pool when you eventually exit.”
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