Questioning Kieser
Recreation Commission wonders about validity of Capital Improvement Plan
Tuesday afternoon’s Recreation Commission Meeting began on a hopeful note: “Howard says 80 degrees by the twenty-first,” reported Chairman Bill Sauser. But thoughts turned quickly to what kind of maintenance and repair work would be necessary after the weather lifts. “There’s a lot of damage this year all over town,” noted Commissioner Teri Stehlik. “Just one of those years.”
With this damage in mind, Chairman Sauser had a bone to pick when it came time for the public presentation on the Town Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) and Prioritization Criteria. Presenter Walter Kieser insisted that input from the Recreation Commission would be an integral part of deciding the priority of projects on the “five year CIP list.” But Sauser wondered “whether anything can be on the CIP list. Right now I don’t think we can afford to maintain what we already have on the ground.”
Kieser agreed. “If you just keep building things and you’re not able to maintain them, you’re digging yourself into a hole,” he assessed.
“So the CIP may not even be a five-year plan,” Sauser clarified. “We might not be able to do anything in five years.”
Kieser acknowledged that the “five year CIP” may be a misnomer, but pointed out that the CIP will have “a first tier allocation to deal with maintenance and repair.” The CIP won’t be driven by projects, he said, but by money. Where there’s money, projects will follow.
Considering current funding shortages, the Commission wondered where that money was going to come from … perhaps from Measure U and R — which Kieser called “money from heaven.”
Even if the CIP is more of a 10 or 15 year plan, Kieser argued for its value in creating “a trail, a logic” to follow to see where certain projects came from. That logic could be valuable for a Town that Sauser characterized as “lousy on inventorying funds, especially funds needed for the maintenance of what it already has.”
Considering these and other insights, the Commission had another question for presenters: how will it get full input on the Plan before it becomes finalized?
“This is strictly being presented, right?” asked Stehlik. “Because it seems like we’ve gotten a presentation in the past, then the document passes along as though we’ve had a chance to review it. I’m not okay with that — there needs to be a discussion somewhere.”
Kieser promised that this was “just a presentation,” and that there would be more time to discuss the draft — perhaps even in a joint commission meeting.
Whenever the CIP gets discussed again, Kieser believes that it’s “very important to empower the Commissions, either Mobility or Recreation, in this process.” The Recreation Commission couldn’t agree more.
