Richmond council adopts new capital-improvement prioritization system emphasizing equity and deferred maintenance

The Richmond City Council on a unanimous vote adopted a citywide prioritization framework for capital improvement projects that allocates points across equity, required work, project readiness, deferred maintenance and several strategic goal areas.

The council adopted the scoring system after several hours of discussion about how to define equity, how to account for grant-funded commitments and how to ensure projects that have been repeatedly deferred get a path to funding.

Council members and staff said the goal is to make CIP decision-making more transparent and to enable staff to deliver ranked project lists by program. Council Member Maria Jimenez moved the adopted weighting; the motion passed on a roll call vote with all council members present voting yes.

Under the system the council adopted, equity and required work each receive 16 points; project readiness and deferred maintenance receive 12 points each; the strategic goal buckets (environment, economic development, quality of life/community health, public safety and housing) and a new internal-services category each receive 6 points; and plan-implementation and collaboration receive 4 points apiece. The collaboration category was revised to explicitly include community-building and volunteer partnerships. Council members asked staff to apply the criteria across programmatic buckets (for example, parks-to-parks; pavement-to-pavement) rather than pitting disparate project types against one another.

Council Member Melinda Robinson asked for clarity on how the city will define equity in scoring: "Are we using an existing platform like CalEnviroScreen or something like that to determine what we mean by equity, where it has quantitative factors that can, you know, kind of go by neighborhood or by census tract?" Staff and council agreed the adopted definition will rely on three sources: the SB 535 disadvantaged-communities criteria, the Government Alliance on Race and Equity (GARE) guidance, and Richmond's environmental justice goals.

Robert Armijo, deputy public works director and city engineer, proposed breaking equity into subcategories so council could assign points across different equity dimensions. "Equity, maybe that's broken into subcategories and maybe council could suggest how many of the 19 points are distributed amongst the subcategories," Armijo told the council during deliberations.

Joseph Muñoz, assistant deputy director of public-works engineering, clarified how past budget adjustments appear in the unfunded list. "We moved it to Parchester. That will be displayed in a future meeting and clarified then for fiscal year 25-26," Muñoz said of a previously noted allocation for Booker T. Anderson.

Deputy City Manager Lashonda White urged council to expect staff to use the adopted priorities to guide which grants the city pursues. "Just because there's a grant available doesn't mean you go after it," White said. "Staff can take this information from the ranking and say, okay, we understand that council believes that these 10 things are priorities."

Council members said the next step will be to give staff the adopted methodology, allow staff to score and rank projects by program, and return to council during the budget season with program-level recommendations and a timeline for implementation. Staff said they will present refined project lists and budget implications in the coming budget cycle.

The council vote was unanimous. After the vote, Mayor Alex Martinez thanked staff and the council for the work on the new system and directed staff to proceed with applying the methodology to the city's unfunded request list.