Finance committee presses for assembly input, narrower scope in draft capital improvement program

The Skagway Municipality Finance Committee reviewed a draft capital improvement program designed to prioritize and plan municipal projects over a multiyear horizon, but members raised concerns this week about scope, scoring transparency and how much authority the assembly would retain.

Emily Deach, borough manager, presented the framework, describing a scoring matrix to rank projects by criticality and a process to adopt a program document by resolution with annual capital improvement budgets adopted by ordinance. "This is a methodical way that we can look at least five years into the future," Deach said, explaining the plan would help staff and the assembly plan maintenance and avoid repeatedly designing projects that then stall.

Committee members said the draft as written risked treating many discretionary projects the same as critical infrastructure. One attendee asked whether the program would funnel every project over a certain threshold into the CIP rubric and suggested that could create bureaucratic delays for community-driven initiatives that need quicker action. "I'm a little hesitant that everything gets grouped into this and that becomes ... a bureaucratic stalling," a committee member said.

Another member raised a related concern about the prioritization matrix favoring firms with existing relationships and noted the draft appears largely staff-driven. "I worry about unfair advantage that could occur in the scoring criteria process," the member said, asking for formal assembly involvement in scoring and prioritization so policy goals are reflected.

Deach said the assembly would still control appropriations through the annual budget: projects listed in the CIP would not be automatically funded without the budget step. "You would adopt the capital improvements plan with the projects and those would be what would be put into the budget for you to approve or not," she said.

Members asked staff to revise the draft to: narrow the CIP's scope toward critical infrastructure where desired, add formal assembly input to the scoring process, and preserve flexibility to accommodate policy changes or new priorities. The manager agreed to return a revised draft at the next meeting.

The committee did not adopt the draft at this meeting; members asked for a redraft that incorporates the three themes and more explicit language about decision points in the annual budget cycle.