Council’s budget approval prompts discussion of parks needs

Scott Swanson

The City Council on June 27 adopted a $23,584,755 budget for fiscal year 2017-18 after a hearing in which several council members weighed in heavily on the city’s parks situation.

The approval was unanimous by Mayor Greg Mahler and council members Susan Coleman, Diane Gerson, James Goble, Lisa Gourley and Dave Trask. Councilor Ryan Underwood was absent – and Mahler pointed out, as the meeting began, that the absence was “unexcused.”

Budget Committee Chairman Dave Holley highlighted a number of developments that have occurred since his committee members approved the budget in May and sent it to the council for adoption.

He noted that although the 2017-18 budget total represents an 11.6 percent increase over the previous year, if Sweet Home wins a $2 million grant it’s seeking to pay for wastewater improvements, the actual increase will be more like 2 percent.

“We have to put that money in there and that makes it look like there’s a huge increase in the budget,” Holley said.

He also pointed out that the 2017-18 budget includes some in $215,000 federal housing rehabilitation grant money from a program that has been discontinued. The city, Holley said, has been given free rein to spend the money, so the funding has been “renamed” as an Economic Development Fund.

Also, he reported, a recipient of a previous rehabilitation grant, which have not been issued since 2010, has repaid some $15,000 since the last Budget Committee meeting, which adds to the economic development total.

He said a positive step was transferring “for the first time in my recent memory” $40,000 from a budget line item state gas tax fund to a fund to be used for road maintenance.

“You can’t do a project with that, but it’s a start,” he said. “It’s getting money into a secured account that can be used for those types of things. I think that was a good thing to do.”

Holley also pointed out how moving Police Department’s Code Enforcement Officer position to the city’s General Fund in the 2017-18 budget actually did little to take “pressure off the police part of the budget” because the Community Services Officer position, which was previously split with code enforcement, remains full-time on the department’s roster.

“The result was zero savings,” he said, adding that Budget Committee members have discussed that situation but have taken no action on it.

“If the council wants to do something about that, they would have to do it themselves.”

Holley also predicted that SHPD’s dispatch funding will become a problem for the city as compression increases.

“We are going to have to take a hard look at that.”

The mention of the Police Department funding segued into talk of the situation with city parks and the addition of two parks staff position, one of them supervisory.

“We are going to have two full-time parks people,” Trask said. “I’m not sure we need two full-time parks people year-round.

“I would think that in the spring, through the summer and early fall that would probably be OK, but when winter gets here, that stuff is going to fall off drastically.”

Gerson responded: “I disagree with you about parks. We need to get on the stick on these parks. The fact that Sankey Park is not near ready for summer, I think, is an embarrassment.”

Mahler said the question wasn’t the need for parks help; “but it’s a question of whether that person should be a supervisor,” adding that he’s gotten “feedback” that the need is for “more summer help to help on the front end.”

City Manager Ray Towry said the plan was to put a crew leader in place to ensure that “things are being done effectively and efficiently.”

He said the city has a public works software program called PubWorks that “is actually quite powerful and we have been utilizing it to its full extent.”

New Public Works Director Greg Springman, within his first week on the job, “initiated an update” of the program, he said.

“He said we’ve been paying for a Ferrari but haven’t been taking it out of second gear,” Towry said.

Employees will be trained to use the program and input their activities, he said, which will result in data that will allow supervisors to evaluate how much time is necessary to complete tasks.

“In two or three years we will have some really great data where we are going to be able to tell you exactly how many man-hours are being spent, at what park, exactly what task. That will really help the budget process to become lot more efficient.”

Springman said staffers could be trained to use smartphones to input “data,” which would eliminate the need to “remember till they get back to the office and write it down.”

Several council members and Parks Board Chairwoman Angela Clegg voiced frustrations over the lack of progress on upgrading the city’s parks, particularly inertia in spending available money on parks improvements.

Clegg said having such data will enable her and city staffers to “emphasize to the community ‘this is why we’ve done these certain things and this is why we haven’t.’

“I feel like we’ve been sitting on this money way too long and not getting things done.”

“We have beat this stuff to death,” said Trask, who sits on the parks committee, adding that plans are complete for Sankey and Strawberry parks, and money is available for work at the BMX park and getting a trail built in Hobart Natural Area.

He said attempts to go ahead with those projects have hit “roadblocks.”

“I’m telling you, that’s frustrating,” he said. “It’s very frustrating. But I think that’s going to change.”

Mahler said he had the same questions when he sat on the parks board.

“I’m just as impatient as you are, trust me,” he said. “Our parks are not even close to where they need to be. It’s frustrating, because I personally believe that if the money is there, it should be spent.”

Clegg said because plans have been done by the University of Oregon for Sankey and Strawberry parks, those are the ones that are “priority.”

She said Parks Board members “are not afraid” to spend money, but “there’s been a lot of transition in the last year, on the council and different things happening. Things keep getting put on hold. It is frustrating.”

Trask said that, in the several years following the completion of the Strawberry Park plan and he has sat on the Parks Board, if money that was budgeted for parks had actually been spent, “there might be a couple of hundred thousand dollars in there.

“If we don’t spend it, it goes back into the General Fund,” he noted.

Mahler had the last word: Whatever we need to do, we need to move forward with this. There’s your directive.”

In other action June 20, the council:

n Held a second reading of an ordinance that will provide the city with more options to deal with nuisance dogs;

n Re-appointed Kevin Hill to the Library Board;

n Appointed Don Hopkins to the Library Board.

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