I did also listen to the 3 pm workshop, mostly on Capital Improvement Projects, or CIP projects.
There are a group of five houses or so on San Antonio street, right where Bishop meets San Antonio, and they all flood regularly. This has been going on for years and years. Several people spoke and asked if their project could be accelerated.
The answer was “no, not really.” Basically the CIP list gives the wrong impression on timelines. It only tracks how much money will be dedicated to each project in each year. But that is not the actual timeline of the project, because the design phase doesn’t need a big allotment of money. What that means is that the project is already in progress, even though it doesn’t look like it has started yet according to CIP funding. When it’s time to spend money, the money will appear as scheduled. However, the projects can’t be sped up, because they’re already in motion and each step holds up the next step.
To me, this means something deeper: City Council and P&Z are being asked to put their input into a document that has very little flexibility. Therefore their input is coming at the wrong stage. If the city staff were systematically biased in favor of certain parts of the city, that would not be visible from the CIP list, because we have no way of knowing which projects aren’t ever rising into the conversation about potential future projects.
The answer has to be something about a supervised process to determine which projects are rising to attention in the first place, with attention to making it equitable. That’s the part that needs public scrutiny.
The San Marxist 