Part one today, the rest on Wednesday – hopefully. These were all capital budget amendments. This process drives me absolutely nuts. They can make amendments, but the public can’t speak to those amendments – or get copies of them in advance. The only way to get copies is to go to the meeting. I’m also annoyed that there was just one big amendment, with virtually no discussion because they had it all worked out in advance and now it is time to shut up and vote. I guess the upside is the meeting is short. ??!
First, the alphabet soup! These are the committees that have amendments discussed below.
EANR = Environment, Agricultural and Natural Resources
PP&J = Public Protection and Judiciary
HHN = Health and Human Needs
ZLR = Zoning and Land (use) Regulations
P&F = Personnel and Finance
PWT = Public Works and Transportation
Sharon Corrigan says that they are going to work on the capital budget amendments. She says they have all the amendments in front of them. Scott McDonell has a packet of amendments (46 pages) that he proposes. He says he has a summary sheet as well that shows everything.
McDonell says that the EANR 6, 7 and 8 are out because they have so much carry over money, EANR 9 is slightly lower than originally proposed, Everything else is the same as proposed. He says the intent is that there were a lot of amendments but the County Exec was at $29M, and they had $13M that they added, this brings it down to $32M.
McDonell says that Pheasant Branch is removed and they suggest that they include it in the PARC grant. He says the voting machines were in there as introduced. He says the $2.5M will be $1.2M because they will reimbursed by the communities. The offer to pay half is for 3 years and after that they can do what they want. He is hoping that they will be incentivized by the money. Hesselbein makes sure that there is still a paper ballot. Scott agrees that is important. He says the hand count makes him nervous because people work long hours.
They do the PP&J amendments next. The three amendments remain the same. The sheriff leaves.
McDonell explains the HHN amendments. McDonell says that the day center is in, the SRO is out, but there is another amendment later for a portion of it this year and part next year.
McDonell says that mobile networks and wind energy are out – he says that he hasn’t heard why Wi-Fi instead of phone service at the parks. The Wind Energy he went back and forth on and he’d like to know more about the payback schedule, that is why it is out.
McDonell says that there are three amendments about language that are in there. He says that the Rimrock Rd stuff is out because they struggle to figure out how to do it. He says the Alliant Energy Center is in there cuz the city is looking at other areas. He says the skate park is out but have another proposal later. He explains other items that are in. Hesselbein asks which highways are W and A. McDonell says that both roads are in bad shape and it puts people back to work. Corrigan notes there are some changes in the language about the committee in one of the amendments, but I missed which one.
McDonell says that they have money to do this, so we don’t have to add money, it’s more an issue of jurisdictional control, but there is another amendment later on this. P&F 10.
McDonell says ZLR planning is postponed until 2014, but still plan to do it. He says the planning software is out, they can do a demo to actually see it and that money is in the operating budget. He thinks that is a good way to see if they like it.
P&F 12 reduces stromwater cuz there is $1M in carry over funds
P&F 13 removes stream bank, but it comes back at a higher number
P&F 14 and 15 push it off to 2014 and 2015 cuz we have $8M in carry forward and they are trying to do all the projects, we are committing to the funding but pushing it into years when they have staff time to do it.
P&F 24 lists some projects to level out the items.
P&F 16 says we like the skate park, and want parks to consider it, but not telling them they have to do it.
P&F 17 is a smaller number on SROs to allow us to go through the process to find out what the inventory is, we lost a lot of SRO in the last 10 – 15 years and we may add one and this would allow us to evaluate that. Either in or out of the city.
Skips P&F 18 for now, will come back to it.
P&F 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 are items county executive identified as reasonable reductions, not to defund them but they can be paid for another way or it will take 2 years to do it. Inmate showers have to be staged or they will have none during construction. Legislative tracking software might be an operating expense to go to the cloud, might be able to be zeroed out, they can talk about servers and work stations (he asks Trevor). Trevor says the work stations are 911 and they moved to a 2 year plan and something about the monitors that I missed.
P&F 24 Identifies projects we want in the capital improvement plan in out years – some of the Yahara clean and lake and stream preservation fund money. They are using this money for the stream bank and that is more money than we have in there more.
P&F 18 – Fitchburg has an ambitious plan for skate park and splash park, but they decided they should not earmark PARC grants, Fitchburg is a town without a downtown plan and this would be a nice anchor with a library, but instead of earmarking it they should do it this way. Hesselbein asks if it will be near the library, she thinks it is a great idea. Yes. Solberg asks why this is a city project, if the city is maintaining it after built – McDonell says that is true for all of them, if they win the PARC grant – most are out of the urbanized area, he’d like to see more balance in urbanized areas. Somebody (I think one of the youth) asks why Fitchburg and not the Madison Skate park. McDonell says that there is a lot of support for the skate park and it will go through, if it doesn’t mid year or next year you should redo that. Solberg says she’d be more comfortable having it in the PARC grant. She thinks it should be designated in the PARC grant instead of here. Stubbs says that she is concerned because they allow CDBG to make decisions and it is not always fair. She says they need to think outside the box. She doesn’t want to see them weigh the skate park vs. the splash park and the skate park would win. McDonell says they he thought they could just put $1M in there and say 50% must be spend in the urbanized area and then they would get funded since there aren’t that many grants. But that ties their hands too much. Hesselbein understands Solberg’s point, but likes what McDonell did. Missed a little bit. Erickson asks about the splash park. Hesselbein asks if the county executive likes A and W being in the budget, they say yes.
Corrigan asks about Public Works 10, she wants to make sure it is part of the motion. They say the list is the motion. McDonell says they might have to lift the limit on the PARC grant and they can talk about that on Wednesday.
They are going to vote on the one big motion – they will still consider things on Wednesday as well. This is to make this motion and amend the packet. It passes on a voice vote.
Corrigan explains they will get a packet emailed with operating and they will have that on Wednesday and they will take up the operating budget then.
The end.
Apparently, there may be some amendments missing on the summary sheet, so they may change that on Wednesday as they have not voted yet.
