TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES
LIST OF TABLES
Implementing a CIP allows a community to adopt an orderly and systematic planning approach for the acquisition, financing, and use of capital improvements. This approach affords communities with opportunities to ensure that the program reflects their needs and priorities, and enjoys support not only from elected leaders, but also from the public at large. In addition to opportunities, there are also challenges associated with implementing a CIP, particularly for communities that do it for the first time. However, the benefits associated with the opportunities clearly outweigh the costs of overcoming the challenges. This chapter summarizes some of the most significant opportunities and challenges associated with implementing a CIP in three implementation areas: public and political acceptance, equity, and cost and administration.[xx]
The public’s perception of the CIP process depends largely on its transparency and the opportunities for the public to provide input to ensure that the CIP reflects the community’s needs and priorities. Fortunately, the CIP is, by design, a tool that includes multiple opportunities to keep the public informed about future public improvements and involve them in the process of identifying and prioritizing them. This feature of the CIP process provides certainty not only for local residents, but also for business owners, developers, and bond investors regarding the vitality of the community, the cost of services, and the sustainability of its tax burden.
Implementing a CIP can also be considered beneficial from the standpoint of helping generate political support from elected officials. The CIP’s systematic and rational approach to identify and prioritize public improvements helps reduce pressure on elected officials when implementing projects that are not highly ranked by providing them with a solid basis to defend the priorities in the program. In addition, a CIP can help maintain steady payments and tax rates over a period of time. However, there are also potential political acceptance challenges in implementing a CIP. More specifically, it is possible to find elected officials who are uncomfortable sharing control of the process with the public or with other levels of government, and who may shy away from supporting the adoption of a CIP.
Implementing a CIP also provides a mechanism to help ensure that capital investment decisions are made considering fairness to all stakeholders in a community in terms of who incurs the costs and consequences of those decisions. This is because the CIP process involves ranking investments based on predetermined, measurable criteria, such as the number of residents served, geographic area served, socioeconomic needs, and project readiness. Ranking projects in this manner can help ensure that capital improvements are strategically located where public needs and priorities are greatest.
Some cities have gone a step further and added equity-specific indicators to measure how its CIP allocations are distributed within neighborhoods in their jurisdiction. For example, the City of Baltimore, Maryland, has included race and income indicators and developed a methodology to assess the distribution of current and recent CIP investments, and use the assessment to build a more equitable distribution in future CIPs.16
Implementing a CIP has both benefits and challenges from a cost standpoint. During the annual capital budget process, individual projects recommended in the approved CIP are funded using a variety of mechanisms, such as property taxes, user and impact fees, special assessments, grants, or bonds. Having a CIP can afford a community financial benefits, such as enhancing their credit rating (and lower borrowing rates), promoting economic development, spotting hidden costs or avoiding unexpected expenditures, and successfully competing for State or Federal funds. The cost challenge that communities may face in implementing a CIP is that it demands a multidisciplinary team skilled in financial management (i.e., budgeting, cost estimation, and forecasting), project management, and public participation.
Managing, maintaining, and monitoring a CIP also poses some administrative challenges; however, implementing projects without a CIP may pose even more challenges. Implementing a CIP, particularly for the first time, requires a considerable amount of effort from local government officials and staff. Over time, the process of updating an existing CIP (or developing a new one) becomes more familiar and less demanding. Incorporating into the process an annual review and the use of standardized tools, such project request forms, can help reduce the administrative burden on local officials and staff. Nevertheless, the effort and time spent may be clearly outweighed by the benefits of having orderly and systematic planning for the acquisition, financing, and use of capital improvements.
[xx] The three implementation areas have been adapted from the Capital Improvement Plan Report Card approach used by the Center for Land Use Education (CLUE), at the University of Wisconsin, in its Plan Implementation Tool series. While public acceptance refers to the public’s positive or negative perception of the tool, political acceptance refers to the elected official’s willingness to implement the tool. Equity refers to the fairness to community stakeholders in terms of who incurs the costs and consequences. Finally, while cost refers to the financial or staff resources needed to implement the tool, administration refers to the level of complexity to manage, maintain, and monitor the tool.1
