City Council Work Session

Paul Nabtistaffby voiceThank you, Mayor Reed and members of the council. Each year, the Planning Commission reviews the Capital Improvement Program in its draft form before it goes to City Council and provides recommendations. This is a effort that is defined in the Code of Virginia for the Planning Commission to do each year. So, the Planning Commission has spent the last couple of months looking at the CIP and preparing these recommendations, which were submitted to you in the form of a resolution that was adopted in a public hearing at their last meeting last Monday. Coincidentally around the same time the Planning Commission also develops an annual report as defined in our city code and attached to that and update to

our comprehensive plan implementation guides so the purpose of tonight's work session is for the Planning Commission to present to you their recommendations from the capital improvement program and then following that I'll give you a brief summary of what the annual report and implementation guides are we won't go through the details of those there's a lot of information that's a resource you will have for anything that you'll be working on in the future so for a quick review of the capital improvement program review schedule the planning commission received a presentation from the city manager on the cip in november and has spent a portion of all of their meetings since then discussing it and going over the recommendations reviewing it in comparison to the comprehensive

Speaker 6Thank you. As the corporate memory, I guess, as long as I can remember, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. as it was discussed in past years the capital improvement program is a long-term program to better the facilities in the city and it has to be kept in context with everything else you're doing in the budget and all of the other spending that goes on and things along that line two points I would make. One, we're never going to run out of projects, provided we have good leadership in all of our departments and the staff, to say these are things that we can improve. Therefore, it's something that you have to come down and say that we've got more than we can do. Let's do a reasonable amount, keep it in balance with everything else, and look out there,

which means that we should not be out of projects in four years or five years. There should be projects on the capital improvement program that fill out the entire five-year budget. Some are more important than others in that they have to be done for safety reasons or other things. Some are things that we just would like to have that might not fit immediately, but we have to have them on the list to plan for them. so the capital improvement program should in its totality stretch out to the horizon if you will because we're not going away as a city it's not like my house where once i get certain things done they're they're done for a long time or forever uh we're a different kind of organization

so from that standpoint keeping the capital improvement program in proportion to everything else that's going on. When I say it's the best of times, it's the worst of times. Right now, times are pretty good. But we have been at other times on my term on the Planning Commission when it was the worst of times, when the capital improvement program was a million dollars for all of the city's general projects. And when you think of what you can get for that, and it includes repairing roads, keeping up the sewers, buying new vehicles, all of the rest of that you're saying how could we exist but in the worst of times that's where you might find of yourself so i would recommend budgeting a cushion into things so that when the

economy changes because right now in the best of times it's never going to change but something is going to happen to cause us so have a pad so that you can adjust and adjust the projects that we have to do and work with. And from that standpoint, looking at the capital improvement program and saying, yeah, but we could finance all of this stuff and just take bond issue and take a little bit of cash and bring on a lot of debt and do all of these projects. Is that fiscally responsible? Keep the capital improvement program in the fiscal bounds of the city. That's the challenge that we've had for a long time in recommending projects. and when we look at it in its totality over five years saying, yeah, it's balanced.