Commission outlines priorities for 20-year capital facilities plan, seeks project inputs

Ben Turner, Liberty Lake’s public works director, told the Parks and Arts Commission the city has started a working group to produce a 20-year Capital Facilities Plan (CFP) and asked commissioners to identify unfunded projects to include in that plan.

Turner said the CFP effort is organized into roughly nine or 10 capital classifications; parks and public art are two of the categories for which the commission’s input is especially valuable. He described the working-group schedule — weekly meetings for the next four to five weeks to assemble a draft — and asked commissioners for projects that are not already captured in asset-planning software, citing a long-standing community request for a dog park as one example of an unfunded project.

Turner discussed setting a maintenance allocation for public art to cover repainting and upkeep as pieces age; commissioners discussed an illustrative starting figure of $10,000 per year for maintenance and noted the need to present a normalized, multi-year funding view to council. Turner emphasized that the 20-year document will be a framework to feed the city’s six-year CFPs and that the six-year CFP will function as the living document updated annually.

Commissioners asked about using the CFP to phase projects and to avoid overcommitting across fiscal years; the city’s finance director advised treating out-year items as planned but subject to adjustment as budgets are finalized.

Next steps: Commissioners were asked to provide project ideas and priorities to staff so the working group can produce a draft CFP for discussion at the next commission meeting.