[B]urlington Mayor Miro Weinberger says the city will look for cost savings and perhaps scale back projects to deal with a $60 million deficit in its 10-year capital spending plan.
“I’m not overly alarmed by that figure,” said Weinberger, “but it is a serious challenge, and I want to be clear about that. That level of investment will not be easy for us to achieve.”
Ideally, Weinberger said, at least part of the deficit will be filled by finding cheaper and more efficient ways to run and repair the city’s infrastructure.
The city appointed property and facilities manager Martha Keenan to look into ways to stretch the budget.
Weinberger and Keenan are considering money-saving measures such as sharing vehicles or facilities between departments, for example. They’re also looking into a new method of repairing sidewalks by sawcutting them instead of replacing them entirely, at substantially reduced cost.
These cost-cutting measures “have the potential to bring down that $62 million figure – you know, materially – I don’t think it’s gonna make it go away, but we could see some savings as we engage this further,” Weinberger said.
The budget was laid out at a City Council meeting last week in which some attendees raised concerns over the capital plan, which allocates the distribution of more than $180 million while projecting about $120 million in revenue.
“If a taxpayer or constituent came to us, what should we say to them to have them not feel as if the fact that there’s a 10-year forecast with a $63 million deficit is cause for alarm?” asked Kyle Dodson, director of community service and civic engagement at Champlain College and a Burlington School Board member.
Keenan said the cooperative nature of the spending plan allows the city to more efficiently target its spending, prioritizing funding to departments that need it immediately and deferring those that can wait.
“Collaborating and working together creates a unity – and that’s just sort of a philosophical feeling on my part – in that by being transparent and sharing the data and the needs cross-departmentally, it allows people to share better,” Keenan said.
Within her first three months as project manager, Keenan solved problems that the Fletcher Free Library had been struggling with for years, Library Director Ruby Simon said at the meeting.
Keenan predicted that she’d have similar success closing out the deficit in the capital budget.
“I’m a glass half full kind of lady, so I see two-thirds of the shortfall already full,” she joked at the meeting.
Despite the cost, Weinberger said he views maintaining the city’s physical assets as vital to the health of the city.
“We always had as our top priority of the administration getting the city’s finances in order,” Weinberger said. “I think as we gradually came to be aware of deficiencies we had in our sidewalks and in our garages, concerns about the buildings, I came to see this as part of our core responsibility – making sure that we were responsible stewards of the city’s infrastructure.”
Ultimately, the success of the capital plan may come down to the administration’s willingness to trim the fat. Projects deemed essential, such as the $5,331,940 renovation of 4.5 miles of sidewalk, will be prioritized. Projects deemed nonessential, such as a $15 million renovation of Memorial Auditorium, may need to be sacrificed.
“We’re going to investigate those numbers further and really ask – is this really something we have to do, or is this a luxury?” Weinberger said.
