Capital committee agrees method to convert member rankings into weighted RORI scores; members to submit rankings for developer implementation

At its July 31 meeting, the Capital Committee agreed on a practical path to convert members' priority rankings into weighted inputs for the committee's RORI (ranking) system and asked staff to collect those rankings for the developer to implement. Committee members and finance staff spent the meeting discussing how to translate subjective category rankings into the software's required numeric weights.

The decision matters because the RORI scores are used to prioritize capital requests the town will consider before Article 10 and other borrowing or spending decisions. A software constraint highlighted by staff requires that criteria grouped together be normalized so that the group's weights sum to 100 percent rather than assigning 100 percent to every criterion individually.

Brian, a staff member who led the technical explanation, told the committee: "you have created 3 groups called prioritization, quantitative justification for project, and cost," and explained that "the group as a whole has to equal 100% in the criterion when you're doing this calculation." He said the way members had proposed…