The Sun Valley City Council continues to focus its efforts on city improvements planned for the next five years, but it will take months before it whittles departments' requests down to the essentials.
The plan—at its very early draft stage—currently totals about $19.4 million and 90 projects, but Councilman Nils Ribi said that number stands to fall a long way as the City Council weeds out unnecessary demands from departments.
"Departments threw a potpourri of items in here, knowing full well some will never pass," Ribi said.
Departments have all submitted their wish lists to consulting-firm CH2MHILL, hired by the city, which put together the phonebook-thick capital-improvement plan. Now, it will be the council's job to flip through each page, looking at each project in detail to see which are necessities for keeping the city running strong.
Proposed capital-improvement projects are categorized by facilities improvements, beautification and parks, streets, intersections, paths, other, and fixed assets. The last of those are things needing replacement or modifications at a minimum of every two years, like police cars and snowplows.
The council has only begun the process, meeting with department heads and CH2MHILL three times since mid-November to scrutinize the plan dollar by dollar, project by project. It will be a couple of months before the council agrees on a plan and a workable dollar amount.
Once the outlandish requests are thrown out, Ribi said, the council and staff would decide which projects are top priorities and which can wait.
"We're trying to get this down to some manageable draft," he said, "so we can have some serious meetings."
Councilman-elect Bob Youngman has been participating in the discussion, since he will be taking over Councilman Dave Chase's seat in a month. He said it would be a "rather rigorous process."
And it needs to be.
"We need justification from departments on why they need these things and what will happen if they don't get them," Youngman said, calling it a cost-benefit analysis. "Departments need to justify absolutely everything they're proposing."
Ribi said financing the capital improvements won't be addressed until the draft is crafted into a plan, which should take a couple of months.
He said taxpayers would most likely be presented a bill for only a fraction of the entire plan, under the expectation that opportunities such as grants and land donations will present themselves.
City Administrator Sharon Hammer said the portion that taxpayers will be paying will come either through bond issues or through the city's paying for projects as they come along. With a bond, taxpayers have the final say, and two-thirds of those who vote must approve it.
"Let's not even talk about financing this thing yet," Ribi said. "We may end up only financing a couple million dollars."
Trevon Milliard: tmilliard@mtexpress.com
