City Leaders Work to Rank Future Projects

On Tuesday the Paducah Board of Commissioners met with city department heads in a workshop setting to start to develop a list of potential upcoming capital projects. 

City Manager Jeff Pederson and Assistant to the City Manager Michelle Smolen led the team through a process to select criteria that will be used to prioritize projects.

After discussion and voting, a set of criteria emerged that will be used to rank projects during the budget process.

Mayor Brandi Harless explained how the ranking system will work. "There'll be a committee put together, and the capital projects on a long list will be put through that ranking system to figure out which ones come up to the top. Then the commission will discuss again whether or not we agree that those projects are the ones we need to actually fund." 

The process began last July with a citizens survey.  

The next step will be for staff to use the prioritization process on a list of potential projects in February. Then, the project rankings and funding options will be presented at a city commission pre-budget workshop., 

Over the past few months, a team of city employees have been evaluating other cities' methods of prioritizing projects.  The other cities included Bowling Green, KY; Tyler, TX; and the North Dakota University System. 

The criteria are often divided into two categories:  outcome and technical.  The outcome criteria relate to how the project impacts a goal while the technical criteria focus more on finances, legislation, and timing.  The team of city employees considered a list of nine possible outcome-based criteria with the goal of reducing the list to five.  They are: Safety, Property, Economic Vitality, Community Development, and Recreation. 

Each project also will be ranked using five technical criteria: Legal Mandate/Regulatory, Implications of Deferring the Project, Relationship to Other Projects/Coordination Capital,  Fiscal Impact, and Operational Budget Impact.