The Town of Sundre requires more detailed pre-design concepts on capital projects to create more accurate budgets in the coming years, an administrator recently told council.
“We need to do pre-design work on future capital infrastructure projects in order to create a capital plan and prepare the capital budget for the next five years with fairly solid estimates for these projects,” said Angie Lucas, acting chief administrative officer and director of planning and operational services during the May 16 meeting.
“The director of finance and administration need to have these solid estimates in order to determine where the various funds that can be used will come from. Using guesstimates doesn't really help.”
So council was presented a request for decision with the recommendation to allocate $50,000 from the infrastructure reserve to pay for the conceptual and pre-design work needed for upcoming capital infrastructure projects as part of the preparation of the future capital plan and budget, she said.
“This money — as it's located right now in reserves — is not accessible to administration in order to pay invoices without bringing every invoice into council.”
With council's summer break around the corner followed by fall budget discussions, Lucas said administration is on a tight timeline.
“We would only spend the money that we would need to spend; the rest would remain and go back into reserves,” she told council.
But Coun. Paul Isaac felt details were lacking.
“It says upcoming capital infrastructure projects, but it doesn't say anywhere what they are,” he said.
“That's what we're still working on,” replied Lucas.
“We already have some red-flagged because you do have a capital budget in place now that has been approved a few times by council — the listed items include Centre Street, Main Avenue, water and wastewater projects.”
The acting CAO told Isaac she is working with the town's engineers on prioritizing which of those projects need to be done sooner rather than later based on a variety of criteria ranging from the potential safety risk to the public using town-owned facilities to the deterioration of, for example, underground services, she said.
“We are putting that criteria together,” she said, adding administration “will be going through that and making sure that the right project is done in the right year with an understanding that we don't have bucketfuls of money.”
Funds are limited, so having a clearer picture of how much certain capital projects are going to cost will help facilitate the process of creating for the coming years more accurate budgets that aren't as prone to unexpected changes because of rough estimates that leave too much room for error, she said.
Isaac didn't seem quite convinced and inquired more specifically what the $50,000 would be spent on.
“For the conceptual planning designs,” answered Lucas.
“Even though those line items are sitting in that capital budget, there have never been any firm estimates done on those projects. They're just guesses of how much we think that's going to cost.”
The Town of Sundre's director of finance and administration, Victor Pirie, has suggested firmer numbers are required before council moves forward towards future budgets.
“I agree with him,” said Lucas.
“And you can only get the firmer numbers if you allow engineering and planning and various design sub-consultants to do that preliminary work, which is all part of the capital project anyway.”
Should council refuse to allow the pre-conceptual design work to go ahead, it would enter budget discussions this fall to approve capital projects based on loose guesses rather than solid estimates, she said.
“Then, going into 2017, we would start doing conceptual planning and design, but because of the timelines, you will not get any capital projects completed in 2017,” she said.
“We went through that with 10th Street (West). We almost didn't complete the project because the timeline was so tough for us. I don't want to go through that again, because some of these projects — such as Main Avenue and Centre Street — are very, very large projects. They're both prominent in the public eye and they must be done correctly. They need the correct amount of time; they can't be rushed.”
Mayor Terry Leslie spoke in favour of the motion, and pointed out that there will be a requirement for the town to prepare a five-year capital plan with the new regulations outlined in the updated Municipal Government Act.
“In order to do that, one of the frustrations I think we might feel is that there are numbers that get pulled out of the air,” he said.
“It's really important for us to have a list of the most important capital projects (and) of the framework around what those potential costs will be.”
Lucas added the projects that require preplanning and design are all infrastructure projects, “and there's not one of them that doesn't need doing. It's not something that we want to do because we have nothing better to do. These are high-profile, high-risk projects. Our biggest problem is prioritizing them because there's such an amount of competing needs.”
Isaac said he appreciates what administration was asking for and agreed it's important to plan properly for future budgets. But the details regarding the recommended motion just weren't sufficient for him to be able to vote in favour of the motion.
“I'm going to approve us to spend $50,000 so we can find out how much more money we need to spend — doesn't make sense to me. I'm not disagreeing with the concept, there's just not enough legwork for me.”
Council carried the motion, with Isaac opposed, to approve the allocation of funds from the infrastructure reserve to move forward on pre-design work for coming capital projects.
