CIP doesn’t stand for “costly improvement plan,” but it certainly could.
Potential expenditures on the initial draft of the city’s capital improvement plan for 2009-2013 mount one on top of another, with plenty of zeroes after commas. Many items — street maintenance and police and fire vehicles and equipment, for instance — can be seen as necessary parts of maintaining and improving a city’s infrastructure. Some other items may not seem so necessary.
The new version of the CIP, if fully funded, would cost more than $47 million over five years — a lot for a small city facing an undetermined financial hit from mass layoffs. Commissioners brought up the dreaded T-word — “taxes” — while examining the initial draft of the CIP at last week’s city work session, signaling that a tax increase may be necessary to fund the CIP, even if it isn’t fully funded as shown in the initial draft. Fully funding it may not be realistic — the city funded only a very small portion of last year’s capital improvement plan.
“There’s no question, to fully fund the CIP, a huge tax increase would be required,” Commissioner Jeff Longbine said. “Whether that’s property tax, or we look for a new revenue source such as sales tax, or something like that — to fully fund it, absolutely.
“Can we get by another year with a minimal tax increase and funding just the absolute necessities of it? Probably. Is that the best thing for us to do long-term? Probably not. I’m anxious for the budget hearings to start, so that we can start getting community input on how they want us to pursue it.”
City Manager Matt Zimmerman introduced the capital improvement plan to the commission last year after the city went several years without one. Because the plan is updated every year, the 2009 CIP is commissioners’ most pressing concern. A little more than $11 million is allocated to 2009 in the current draft.
City department heads placed the annual expenditures for each department in a rank order based on priority, and Zimmerman reviewed those rankings before presenting them to the commission. For the police department, the purchase of three squad cars, a cost of $100,500, is ranked as the department’s No. 1 need for 2009. No. 2 is the purchase of a new evidence management system costing $32,500. The fire department’s top need on the ’09 CIP is a new pump truck costing $450,000.
Other items on the ’09 plan include everything from EMS needs to improvements to the golf shop, zoo, and Civic Building. Some items may not seem important enough to taxpayers to be funded in a tight-budget situation. Replacing the golf shop carpet, listed as the No. 2 need for the golf shop in ’09, would cost $7,000. The Civic Building has 17 items listed in the ’09 plan; in the priority ranking, the 15th and 16th items are the replacement of seven window curtains and the stage curtain in the Little Theater. Those upgrades would cost a combined $12,600.
“I guess the challenge is, every project, every equipment purchase, every upgrade to infrastructure, somehow is warranted,” Longbine said. “But the challenge is, it’s $47 million over the next five years. There’s no question in my mind that the taxpayers are not going to be willing to raise their taxes by that amount.
“So it comes down to what upgrades, what equipment purchases, are the public willing to pay for, and then how do we prioritize those? And then we do what we can afford to do.”
Other commissioners also feel like a tax increase needs to be at least on the table, if not a certainty. Mayor Julie Johnson and Commissioner Bob Agler both braced the public for discussion of a tax hike at last week’s work session, and this week, Commissioners Jim Kessler and Kevin Nelson both made a tax increase sound inevitable.
“Well we don’t have the revenue to take care of the CIP, so obviously, if we are gonna look at doing something, there’s gonna have to be other sources,” Nelson said. “And there’s only very few for a city to be able to do that with.”
“Of course, we go through this whole budgeting process again, and hopefully you can justify that other expenses ... not even withstanding the CIP, the mill levy requirement might go down just a little bit because of different things,” Kessler said. “... We’ve talked about some alternate sources of funding, and I think at some point, it’s probably going to come to a head as far as a sales tax issue.”
Before reintroducing the capital improvement plan last year, Zimmerman said the city had one until it was discontinued four or five years ago.
“And some of that, I’m told, had to do with the fact that the funding simply wasn’t there, what’s the point of constantly ranking projects if you’re not going to be able to fund them?” he said. “Then the new commission, or even the old commission, had said, ‘We really want to get that restarted again, because how do we determine what our funding needs are unless we know what our projects are?’”
He said the commission will be able to review and change the items on the plan.
“They can say, ‘No, we don’t need to do this project,’” he said, “or, ‘Here’s a new project we want to add,’ or, ‘This is how we change the priority.’”
Kessler said fully funding the plan wasn’t realistic, but he also said there wasn’t much that could be cut from the CIP.
“There are smaller items, yeah, if we’re just going down the list,” he said. “Small items at the golf course. Sure, we could do something different with golf carts. We could have a program where they’re leased, or something like that. And the carpet — there are small items.”
Longbine said city equipment has to be kept workable and usable, but he also said he’s not an advocate of purchasing brand new equipment every year. He and Kessler said they see the city’s infrastructure, including streets, sewer and water lines, as a priority.
Nelson said there were things in next year’s CIP that would have to be put off until future years.
“There’s gonna have to be, because $11-million-plus, that’s a big amount,” he said. “This didn’t develop overnight, obviously. It’s something that probably should’ve been developed a long time ago by somebody — either the past city manager, or city commissioners, or somebody, should’ve been taking a harder look at making a list like they’ve done here.”
The commission is next scheduled to take a look at the CIP on April 23.
ddarbro (anonymous) says...
If the city needs more revenue they should look at bringing in more outside revenue. They should look at a bond issue to fund a convention center. A multi use convention center like the one in Claremore, Oklahoma would bring in many events and money into the community. There is now a 30+ acre track off of Graphic Arts Road that would be a perfect location and right off the turnpike for easy access for events. They should look to anywhere else instead of only talking about the residents of Emporia footing the bill with more and more taxes to burden already hurting residence.
April 4, 2008 at 4:17 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
dhcc66 (anonymous) says...
thats really nice, but who is going to fund it and why vacate the exsisting structure we have so many events at downtown??
the civic auditorium hosts many events including a 4 state gymnatsics championship this weekend. 6a basketball tournaments, musical events, evco's trade show, and many more come to the auditorium because it's just the right size. maybe if we look at some of the things the city needs to do to spruce the auditorium and it's grounds up just a little more, like new curtains and some air conditioning for the little theater, who knows how many more events would land and stay here.
leave building big arenas for the big cities. i for one like the one we have now
April 4, 2008 at 6:28 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )