During the second half of Monday night’s special city council meeting, Marshalltown Public Works Director Heather Thomas led discussion on a pair of agenda items related to the Capital Improvement Plan. One of her first comments was that building maintenance hasn’t historically been funded through the CIP levy but does not currently have a permanent funding source.

According to Thomas, five changes have been made from a memo presented during the Jan. 15 council meeting, and department heads have been asked to color code projects based on their level of importance and priority.

“Once we did that, we reviewed, again, knowing that we were still short money. The CIP levy revenue was still not going to cover the expenditures that we requested, so the department head team met on Jan. 23 and talked through additional delays,” she said. “Anything in this packet with red arrows pushing to future years was basically the offering of each department head to help try and balance that budget.”

She then turned the focus to two specific projects she wanted to talk through: replacing the east entrance door and steps at city hall with a few different options — keeping them as is with some minor grinding and sealing on the steps, funding it out of Fund 031 and removing it from a standalone project and incorporating it into the Main Street project.

The other was a park improvement project per year at $150,000 out of Fund 030, and Timber Creek Park is slated to be worked on in Fiscal Year 2025. But as part of an effort to reduce the draw on the fund, she suggested a few alternate courses of action, including using Automated Traffic Enforcement (ATE) revenues set aside for beautification and parks and recreation projects with the caveat that those dollars could go away as the state legislature considers banning traffic cameras. She said because there were several other projects coming in FY25, Parks and Recreation Director Geoff Hubbard would be OK with delaying Timber Creek to a future year.

Councilor Jeff Schneider said a safety issue like the steps should be fixed right away — either short term or long term depending on the dollar amount — and Police Chief Mike Tupper then stepped forward to remind the council that unlike in most years, when the MPD spends $15,000 on body cameras, they are working on a larger project to replace all of the body cameras and all of the dashboard cameras because the vendor no longer supports the products they have.

“We don’t know what it’s gonna cost us yet. It’s gonna be big. I was initially guessing maybe somewhere between $350,000 and $400,000. It might be $500,000, and there will be ongoing general fund expenses with this because everybody wants us to store our data now in the cloud. And that becomes a general fund expense,” Tupper said. “So we have a committee working on this project. I do not anticipate coming to you for money this calendar year, but at some point I am going to come to you with proposals and we’re gonna have to discuss how we handle this in the future. Because these cameras are no longer optional equipment. My cops will not work without their body cameras. I don’t want them to work without their cameras, and we’re gonna have to figure that out down the road. For now, the budget is what it is and we’re good to go, but I’ve been reminding you periodically and I don’t want you to forget that this is a big issue we’re gonna have to tackle at some point.”

Councilor Greg Nichols made a motion to make the changes as outlined in Thomas’s memo. It carried unanimously.

Thomas then presented the second draft of the entire CIP, which she said she didn’t intend to go through line by line as it was over 400 pages long, and asked the council for feedback and questions. If no changes were suggested, she said the department heads would continue to refine it and bring back the third draft at a future meeting. With no further discussion, the council then moved on to the valuations and budget items.

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Contact Robert Maharry

at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or

rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.