Salem Lakes unveils first 30-year capital plan, officials warn of multi‑million-dollar funding gap

Salem Lakes village administrators presented the village’s first 30‑year capital improvement plan and told the Village Board that, under current funding patterns, the municipality faces a multi‑million dollar shortfall in the next budget year.

The capital plan inventory and projection — prepared by village staff with outside consultants — lists every major asset the village owns and estimates replacement costs in today’s dollars. “In 2025, we’ve now developed the village’s first 30‑year capital plan of all village facilities, infrastructure, and equipment,” said Sandra Miller, village administrator.

The plan matters because it quantifies how much the village will need to maintain status quo services and infrastructure. The presentation showed that the village owns about 86.16 miles of roads, roughly 46 miles (about 53 percent) of which are rated at a 6 or lower on the village’s pavement scale. Miller and staff said that to avoid falling further behind the village would need to replace roughly 4.3 miles of roadway each year — a pace the staff estimate would require about $4 million annually for roads alone using current unit costs.

Board members were shown how the village arrived at the funding gap. Miller reviewed the history of the 2017 merger of the Village of Silver Lake and the Town of Salem into the single municipality now called Salem Lakes, and said the merged budget started at about $15 million rather than the roughly $18.9 million that would have been the simple sum of the two pre‑merger budgets. That difference, plus slow…