The Town Council met on Monday, February 10, 2025, at 7:00 PM in Town Hall Council Chambers. The meeting covered capital improvement planning, traffic calming measures, community electricity aggregation, and various routine approvals. Key actions included adopting the Capital Improvement Plan for FY2026-2030, authorizing exploration of automated traffic enforcement, launching a community aggregation program, and approving several grants and contracts.
Welcome to the People's House in North Kingstown for a town council meeting Monday, February tenth, twenty twenty-five. And I'd ask everyone to stand and join for a salute to the flag. Thank you. So the flag of the United States. Undergard. We have uh two items for special business that we're going to start off with. And the first is uh presentation by the Asset Management Commission. Uh the the proposed capital improvement plan for twenty twenty-six through twenty thirty. And Mr. James Halley is a chair of that committee and he is going to uh present us with a PowerPoint presentation that has been previously distributed to the town council. Mr. Halley. Thank you. All of you have um I think uh copies of this, so I'll try not to uh spend a lot of time on it. But um we worked on this in the committee, there's eight people on the committee, and actually most of them are here for me tonight. Jim, can you make sure you speak into the money? Uh we met from November until uh just uh the 30th uh and we talked with the different and we talked with the different departments uh on this uh so we got input from a lot of people, including the town manager and the finance director. Uh prior to this on 2023, there was a bond issue for a new middle school safety complex and a recenter that did not pass. However, there was on 24 there was a bond issue, two bond issues that passed, one for the public safety complex and station one, and one for school facilities upgrade. Uh there we we have uh for the town, we have four funding sources the enterprise fund, non-enterprise fund, school revolving fund projects, and school unfunded projects. Uh all eight members of the committee submitted priority rankings, one being the lowest priority, five being the high highest priority. Uh 40 would be the highest possible score. The high things for the enterprise fund were the well three replacement water, the water condition assessment, and the golf course irrigation pond and the Poplar Point water main planning. Those were were for enterprise funds. Enterprise funds are uh for people in the audience that don't know our uh self-funded departments. They're departments who uh basically make money and spend their own money, so the money doesn't come out of the regular budget. It's a it's included in the regular budget, but it doesn't come out of that. Uh out of the non-enterprise funds, we had road road maintenance was the highest, and that was for ranked third highest overall, municipal office building, and tied for third were the HVAC system for the expansion and upgrade of library, air handling, air exchange facilities improvements, senior center uh improvements, and beach wall. Uh for the school revolving fund, Davisville Middle School was the highest, and then uh management systems for all of the schools were next. The um highest project uh was the North Kingstown High School enhanced interlocking interlock school vegetable in order to provide for safety for the school. Uh and then the uh electrical room ventilation and the Hamilton elementary playground drainage. These were the department request. Note that this does does not include the bond funding. And these are the department requests by funding source, general fund enterprise authorized bond, unauthorized bonds, grants, and unallocated. The school department requests they had six projects in the revolving fund project, and they had 14 unfunded projects. And these were their unfunded projects. And they did not have uh uh money connected to any of them. These were our recommended projects by fiscal year. And these are our project recommended projects by funds. And these are our rankings for the school projects, and our rankings for the unfunded projects, school projects. Our recommendations, number one, were that we have a present clear funding plan in the plans in the budget, that the asset perfection protection funds be embedded in the budgets of each department, so that it's clear to everyone that that we are spending money on our on keeping our assets up to date, that we find additional sources of revenue. Some of that's being done already in terms of the way that the fire department funds replacement of their uh fire engines through the um money that's paid by insurance companies for rescues. Uh that we continue to clearly identify projects funded by fiscal year 2000 in fiscal year 2026, and that we annually publish a five-year plan for projects and show the funding for those projects. We also are recommending that uh work order software be purchased so that we can track we've already the town's already done an assessment of all of the um things that need to be done in terms of uh protection of assets for the town. We have a nice book that's very thick that has a lot of stuff in it. Uh but we'd like to get work order software um to be able to keep up to date the information that's in that book. Uh we'd also like to seek additional opportunities for grant funding, a grant writer, third-party consultant, community collaboration in the development of grants, uh maybe a grant commission. And we'd like to thank uh Adam White, Allie Sparks, Chris Kinder, and Rebecca Ritten, Ralph Motless, Deb Brigham, and Ken Duva, our towns department heads, and most important, the group from the Asset Management Committee who are listed here. If you guys could stand up, please. This is an important job.