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Pleasanton Council adopts data-driven CIP prioritization to guide scarce capital dollars
Summary
The Pleasanton City Council unanimously approved a six-factor capital-improvement prioritization strategy on Dec. 17, creating a transparent scoring system to decide which infrastructure projects the city will fund as it confronts a multi-million-dollar funding gap.
The Pleasanton City Council unanimously approved a new capital improvement prioritization process on Dec. 17, adopting a six-category, weighted scoring system staff said will make decisions about streets, parks, water and other city projects more consistent and transparent.
City Engineer Adam Nelke and Public Works Director Soo Chin Yong presented the plan to the council, saying the system ranks projects against criteria including health and safety, grant leverage and asset condition. "Health and safety and regulatory compliance" received the highest weighting in the proposed rubric, reflecting resident priorities from recent community surveys, Nelke told the council.
The measure comes as the city faces constrained revenue and a long-term infrastructure shortfall. Deputy City Manager Alexa Jeffress told the meeting that Pleasanton's budget forecast shows a general fund structural deficit staff currently estimate at about $13 million per year and an infrastructure funding gap projected to be roughly $900 million over the next decade.
Under the adopted approach, staff will collect project requests from departments and commissions, have sponsors complete uniform project worksheets, and forward scored lists to a multi-department prioritization committee. Projects that are already annually recurring maintenance items will be treated as "core projects" and can be excluded from re-prioritization; enterprise-funded projects (water, sewer) will continue to be guided by dedicated master plans.
Nelke said staff will include a sunset clause: projects that do not advance within five years will be removed from the active list and must be resubmitted, a step intended to reduce a backlog of partially funded items.
Councilmembers pressed staff on how smaller repair projects (for example, HVAC or roof replacements) would be handled versus large capital replacements. Yong said the city's asset management work and condition assessments will help distinguish repair-and-replace items that should remain on a regular maintenance list from larger CIP candidates.
Council member Craig Eicher called the proposal a "clearer" and more defensible process, and Council member Matthew Gaydos said he supported the framework while reserving the council's ability to move projects up or down when reviewing the scored lists. The motion passed unanimously.
Next steps: staff will score the upcoming list of candidate projects, match the prioritized list to available restricted and unrestricted funds, and return to the council with a proposed two-year CIP program as part of the FY25-26 budget cycle. "You'll see the whole list," Nelke said, "and you can ask us why a project scored where it did."
