photo by: Nick Krug

Lawrence City Hall, 6 E. Sixth St., is pictured on May 3, 2016.

City leaders expressed support Tuesday for a new way of prioritizing infrastructure projects and other capital expenses, but some commissioners said they would like to see more emphasis on sustainability.

As part of its regular meeting, the Lawrence City Commission provided feedback to city staff about a new prioritization method for the city’s Capital Improvement Plan that weighs one-time projects based on nine factors. City Manager Craig Owens told the commission that what staff had proposed was a starting point, and it was up to the commissioners to modify the method as they found appropriate.

“You need to build the machine that’s going to produce the priorities of how we spend huge amounts of resources on behalf of this community,” Owens said.

The method involves a new scoring process for prioritizing one-time capital improvement projects. Under the new method, projects are evaluated against nine factors that are assigned different weightings. The nine factors proposed by staff are long-term planning, health/public safety, infrastructure, regulatory compliance, external funding, impact on operating budget, quality of life, location/time and equity/sustainability.

Under the new method, each department will score its projects using the guidelines, and a CIP committee will review the scores for consistency across departments. Most of the factors have a weighted score of two, while the equity and sustainability factor has a weighted score of one, health and public safety a weighted score of three and regulatory compliance a weighted score of four.

This table created by city staff shows the categories and weightings proposed by city staff for a new method to prioritize one-time capital projects.

City staff asked commissioners if there were any categories that were missing and whether the weightings were appropriate.

Commissioner Lisa Larsen, a retired environmental geologist, said she thought sustainability warranted a higher weighting than it received. Currently, the sustainability/equity category has the lowest weighting, and Larsen said leaving the weighting as it was would not help the city meet recent environmental goals, such as its commitment to renewable energy.

“How can we meet those lofty goals that we set in the recent resolution if we are going to give (sustainability) a category weight of basically the lowest that we have on our list here?” Larsen said. She added that because of climate change, she saw sustainability as a factor that also impacted public health and safety.

Commissioner Stuart Boley said he thought the project’s impact on sustainability, the operating budget and city infrastructure projects deserved higher weightings. Vice Mayor Brad Finkeldei said he thought whether a project had external funding deserved less emphasis. All commissioners agreed that equity and sustainability should not be grouped together in the same category.

City staff will use the feedback to make changes to the new prioritization method, and Owens said adjustments could be made as needed. The prioritization guidelines are being discussed in preparation for the city manager’s recommended CIP for 2021-2025, which will ultimately be considered as part of the 2021 budget process.

City Commission Meeting 04/14/20