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In spite of financial difficulties, the city has some good news: there's extra money in the 200304 Capital Improvement Projects budget, which means that several parks, buildings and streets may have a chance for some long-awaited and much-needed improvements.
According to Public Works Director John Cherbone, city council members were able to save approximately $783,000 in the current budget after making changes in work orders to several projects. For instance, instead of installing medians on Saratoga Avenue to help facilitate traffic flow in and out of the library, the council decided to modify the existing striping configuration. Although this would not improve the area aesthetically as a median would have, it saved the city $150,000. In addition, $230,000 became available when the Santa Clara Valley Water District permitted the use of dry wells to address drainage problems. Prior to this ruling, the city had intended to install drainage mechanisms near the El Camino Grande and Monte Vista neighborhoods, where current systems are either nonexistent or inadequate.
Of the $783,000, $228,020 was reallocated to some current CIP projects, including the Highway 9 traffic signal modifications, the McWilliams House restoration and the Memorial Arch improvements. What remains after the tweaking, number crunching and reallocations is a little over a half-million dollars.
"This is a pretty considerable amount of money," said Vice Mayor Ann Waltonsmith. "However, it's definitely not enough to do everything we want to do."
Waltonsmith said that the city will be thinking long and hard over the next several weeks, hopefully with a lot of public input, about how to prioritize the different projects.
"There's going to be a lot of weighing and negotiating," Waltonsmith said. "We have to be careful with how we allocate our money. It's hard to tell what will happen in the future with the new administration."
Cherbone said there are certain criteria to consider when making choices about which projects to address first and fund more heavily than others. Those criteria include public safety, beautification purposes, environmental impacts, community needs, available resources, and operation and maintenance costs.
There are currently 16 new candidate projects to be included in the 200304 CIP budget and three projects that have already been adopted. Those adopted projects entail making various infrastructure repairs at several parks and trails, developing certain areas at Kevin Moran Park and installing landscape and irrigation at existing medians throughout the city.
The total cost for the new and adopted CIP projects is approximately $1,598,000, added to the $24,487,097 needed to fund the 46 projects currently on the list.
According to Cherbone, with the combined funding sources—grants, local agencies and the city's general, parks development and street funds—$17,942,582 is currently available in the budget.
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