COUNCIL FINALIZING 5-YEAR CAPITAL IMPROVEMENT PLAN
Only two City Council meetings remain in 2023. Tonight’s business meeting (when formal votes and decisions are made) will be followed next week with another business meeting, because the remaining Monday falls on December 25th—Christmas.
We already highlighted the City’s draft Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) in our November 6th Bulletin. Tonight, they vote on a final, revised version with a number of significant changes. First, we should point out that the CIP is an incredibly important planning document. The CIP is a gameplan for all the major expenditures (anything over $25,000 with a useful life longer than one year) the City is expecting to make over the next five years. It details each individual capital project, how much it will cost, when it’s planned to be done, and where the money will come from. You can read the CIP here.
Without passage of the Parks & Rec Bond, total funding in the draft CIP went from $588 million to $449 million. Numerous project modifications and removals are detailed below.
Project Removed from Draft CIP:
- Multi-Generational Rec Center ($105 million)
- Castle Rock Park ($12.1 million)
- Centennial Park ($8.1 million)
- Zimmerman Center ($4.1 million)
- North Park Center ($4.1 million)
- Coulson Park ($3.1 million)
- Cottonwood Park ($1 million)
- HWY 3 Underpass ($1 million)
Projects Modified in Draft CIP:
(see modifications by clicking here)
- Poly Vista Park
- South Park Pool
- West End Reservoir
- Stagecoach Trail
- 25th Street Bridge
- N27th St. Side Path
- Alkali Creek Trail
- Downtown-Coulson Trail
- SBURA Unimproved Streets
- MET Security Cameras
- Solid Waste
We appreciate that important parks projects have been modified in order to remain in the CIP, despite the Parks & Rec Bond not passing. In order to ensure those parks are managed as efficiently as possible, we strongly encourage City Staff and City Council to work toward implementing the efficiency recommendations outlined in the 2017 Comprehensive Parks and Recreation Master Plan. A couple important recommendations are noted below:
- “Currently, Parks does not track unit activity costs and therefore cannot analyze the unit cost to perform work internally against the unit cost to perform work by a third-party vendor. Without this level of analysis, the division is unable to determine if it is more effective and efficient to perform work ‘in-house’ or to ‘contract it out’.” (pg. 10)
- “Through the development of management processes, the Parks Division must begin to track unit activity costs through the implementation of a work order management system and in turn, would internally analyze the unit cost to perform work internally against the unit cost to perform work by a third-party vendor.” (pg. 11)
- ”42% of all labor efforts for general parks and grounds maintenance is expended on traveling from location to location as well as ‘loading and unloading’ of equipment at the beginning and end of each work day. This equates to 3.36 hours of every 8-hour day per person. The majority of this unproductive time is due to the large amount of windshield time (travel time between parks).” (pg. 10)
- “It is recommended that basic satellite maintenance yards be constructed (one in the Heights and one in the West End) to more efficiently and effectively perform park maintenance functions by reducing windshield time.” (pg. 11)
Click on the image below to go to the City’s interactive GIS map which details everything in the CIP. As a brief note of caution, when we last checked, it was not updated with the changes above. Presumably, staff is waiting to make those changes until formally approved by City Council.
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