Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

James FeatherIt's been moved and seconded to adopt the policy as provided. Any further discussion? All those in favor, say aye, please. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Passes unanimously. All right. Next door of business, public hearings. We have none this evening, so we will recess our regular meeting and go into our work session, which is our continued discussion on the proposed fiscal year 2027 to 2031 capital improvement program. Mr. Napty.

NaptystaffThank you again, Chair Feather and members of the Planning Commission. process has been underway since November when you received a presentation from the acting city manager on the draft capital improvement program at that time. You since held several discussions to begin to develop recommendations to be presented to city council, the last one being on December 8th. So for today, we will continue that discussion with the goal of drafting some or preparing some draft recommendations to be ready for a public hearing at your next meeting, January 26th, which is already scheduled. We will then ask planning commissioners to come to the city council work session on February 3rd to present your recommendations. So the goal for

into what we thought some of the recommendations might be at that time. A reminder of the commission's role as defined in the city code is to determine conformance of the capital improvement program with the comprehensive plan as you are the overseers of the comprehensive plan. This can be done on a number of levels. One is to determine conformance of individual projects with the comprehensive plan and we've already talked about how those are identified in the capital improvement program a second way is to advise council on city priorities among proposed projects City Council is always in the position of having to choose which projects to recommend to be supported in conformance with the proposed capital improvement program and

the Planning Commission can help them with that by helping prioritize projects based on how important they are in the comprehensive plan. And then lastly, to anticipate future considerations. This is kind of the inverse of the first recommendation, is to make sure that projects that are in the capital improvement program are being planned for and not being omitted. A summary of your conversation on December 8th, we included a summary of the comments that we heard in your staff report, and those were broken up into three categories. The first is general capital comments. Commission typically provides to City Council are general comments to help them prioritize rather than focusing on specific projects. They identify what priority should be, what is most important in

these are the ones that we don't recommend you provide as formal recommendations but are here for guidance. Some things we heard December 8th is that the city has a competitive tax rate and there is value in living in the city. Second, that rating criteria from bond rating agencies focuses on ongoing costs over capital investment. This was in relation to concerns that were raised about how the capital improvement program could infect our bond ratings. And then lastly, that many current financial obligations are a result of deferred improvements. This was a result of a comment we heard at a previous work session asking about the significant increase in the overall amount of the capital improvement program

Paul CunninghamI think that in city council's realm, they're dealing with the ongoing political environment. and if you're a person with children in the school system, your focus is what's happening in the next two years or three years in school and how will my children change. If you look at the ongoing greater political activity in the metro area, a great many people are saying, hey, I've lost my job. What's going on with the government? The stability of the playing field is changing rapidly. keep traction so that I can stay involved and succeed in this process. And some of what we're talking about here as a planning commission is looking at putting in the facilities for the capital improvement program that are going to transcend these

Naptystaffengage page set up for a while so they'll be wrapping up the planning phase for this and moving toward construction and additionally there'll be a consideration of additional funds and a word of contract for the George Snyder trail this is also a project that's mentioned in the comprehensive plan for your upcoming meeting on January 26 we'll be having our public hearing on the capital improvement program of leaves as we've discussed you will have a presentation on the urban forest master plan you just received a presentation on that in December as you may recall but the public hearing is scheduled on this on January 27th with City Council and we are going to ask this planning commission to provide a formal recommendation to them you won't necessarily need a public