Planning Commission Regular Meeting/Work Session

James FeatherPasses four to zero to one. Next item is the item is not requiring a public hearing. We have none of those tonight, nor do we have any public hearing, so we will recess our regular meeting and go into our work session, which has one item this evening, which is continuing the discussion on the proposed fiscal year 2027 to 31 capital improvement program. We'll have a report from a staff lead, Mr. Napty. Thank you.

NaptystaffThank you, Chair Feather and members of the Planning Commission. This is a continuation of our discussion of the capital improvement program. As the Planning Commission may recall, you had an introduction by the acting city manager and the chief financial officer at your last meeting on November 10. And that was a first introduction to the CIP. At that time, you did not have access to the draft CIP that came out later that week. So you now had time to take a look at that. And this is the Planning Commission's first opportunity to have your own deliberations on how you want to proceed with developing recommendations to the City Council on the CIP. going forward after tonight's meeting you will have the flexibility over the course of your next several meetings

Paul Cunninghamwanted. Thank you. That's the page I wanted and that page is perfect. It says that for FY2026, the adopted general fund portion of the CIP appears to be $48,239,164. And the total capital program budget for FY26, which is the approved one we're operating, one is $97,068,775. So I presume those are the actual numbers we are working off of. What I am going to reference in my comments here is let's just go back 10 years to 2016 And in 2016, the actual general fund number was $6,465,532. So from 2016 to 2026, that looks like about an eight times increase in what we're putting into the capital improvement program. If I look at the $97 million and go back to 2016, that number was $34,850,332, or about three times the amount that we were putting into the capital improvement 10 years ago.

So when I go back and look at the real estate tax records on my house in 2016, it's a little under $8,000. And when I look at the current assessment area, it's a little over $10,000. So that 2000 delta is a 25% increase in my property taxes. When I look at a 25% increase in my property taxes, but a six-fold increase in the CIP for general funding and a three-fold increase, a 3X increase in the total capital improvement program, my question in a budgeting standpoint is, where's this money coming from? I'm obviously not paying for it. so where when we get this far out of out of alignment is the funding coming from when we talk about being in a tight budget position and i know in the last 10 years we started out with

The more people we bring in and the more they bring in expenses that bring us to the CIP, so to speak up to a point where we have major expenses and can't control this, seems to be losing sight of our goal as a city to remain functional. So when I get down to looking at again, the capital improvement program, all of the projects in there as you have noted, are required to be supported in the comp plan. The way we have written the comp plan with specific goals, all of the projects that come forward come from one of those goals. So almost by definition, everything that comes forward in the CIP is something that we have said we want to do as a city. We want to do a whole lot more, I believe, than we physically can.

If we can go back to that last slide that was a summary of all the budget stuff. if the proposal if I go over that blue column for the proposed for 27 ends up being 13,500,000 roughly the proposal for 28 is 32,600,000 the proposal for is 43 million 800. The proposal for 20 for 30 is 82 million. Uh, that's not a very smooth line when we're talking about a capital improvement program. That's, that's a discussion for chaos and the general fund as to what gets funded and what doesn't. We've got more projects that are valid projects than we can handle in any year. and the ones we don't get to don't become invalid projects. So this is a challenging process to deal with the CIP and fund the most important projects to the city.

It would be useful, I think, also to have an understanding or a better understanding when we're talking about the capital improvement program as to what is actually being carried in cash flow from the city's coffers on an annual basis and what is being carried in debt service or budgeting because you get a force multiplier. if I can buy something that costs $10, but I only have to pay $1 a year for 10 years to get it. And so we have tended to use financing, I think, more and more in recent years to get more of the things that we wanted. And a more thorough discussion on that, I think, might be illuminating.