Finance committee reviews draft five-year capital improvement program, flags Measure C constraints

Santa Barbara City Finance Committee members received an informational briefing March 4 on the city’s draft five-year Capital Improvement Program, which staff said lists about $2 billion in identified capital needs and focuses on matching the first two years of projects to anticipated funding.

The draft CIP is a planning document that looks ahead five years but stresses the first two years because those years form the basis of the city’s upcoming biennial capital budget. “This is a document we put together, every 2 years and it looks ahead, 5 years,” Acting Public Works Director Brian DeMour said during the presentation.

DeMour told the committee the draft identifies more work than available funding and that staff used a new scoring methodology to help prioritize projects without treating the score as the sole decision factor. “So you can see here we’re at about $2,000,000,000 worth of identified capital needs within our plan,” DeMour said, noting about half of that total is categorized as future needs rather than immediate first-two-year priorities.

Why it matters: the CIP determines which capital projects the city will actively seek to fund, and it is used to pursue grants and plan debt or cash funding.…