Cheney engages in rapid-fire ordinance approvals

In whirlwind-style action at its July 10 meeting, Cheney’s City Council passed five ordinances that did everything from proposing capital facilities projects to incorporating new zoning changes and moving money to pay for debt principal and interest.

Four of the ordinances originally came before the city’s Planning Commission, three on May 14 and one on June 11, receiving unanimous recommendations for adoption by the council. Council held the first readings and a public hearing on all three at their June 26 meeting, and finalized that last Tuesday, with Public Works Director Todd Ableman saying the city had received no citizen comments since the June 26 meeting.

Ordinance X-29 adopted the city’s five-year capital facilities plan — a plan that if paid for and enacted would mean over $21.2 million in new projects and equipment. The plan boils down to a city wish list for items in transportation, water, wastewater, solid waste, street equipment, parks, power, public safety, buildings/facilities and information technology and the historic Sterling Moorman House.

Public safety accounted for the largest amount at almost $4.95 million — most of which comes from a proposed $3 million remodeling of the city’s fire station in 2019. Transportation was second at about $4.55 million, much of it in annual street and arterial preservation work.

Water was third at $3.477 million, with about $1.8 million accounted for through the redrilling of the city’s potable water well No. 3. Bids drilling of a new well shaft are scheduled to be opened July 18.

Parks proposed five-year facilities expenditures of just over $1 million, with $500,000 going towards renovation work on the city’s 50-plus year old pool in 2020.

Ordinances X-30 and X-31 dealt with incorporating updated requirements for critical areas and the zoning codes mandated by the state’s Growth Management Act. Ordinance X-31 also included city requested zoning code changes dealing with definitions of bedrooms and dens, residential parking requirements and how much residential would be allowed in a commercial zone.

Ordinance X-32 dealt with amending development standards for non-residential buildings allowed through conditional use permits in single-family (R-1) and two-family (R-2) zones. Some of the changes came about through the current high school expansion and remodeling project, particularly with regards to a building’s height.

The high school requested a height variance for its new 500-seat performing arts center auditorium, but was denied twice by the city’s hearing examiner — who also proposed in his opinion that the best way to accommodate that request was through code changes. By voting yes, the council put those changes into effect and allowed the auditorium project to go forward.

The final ordinance was the city’s first budget amendment of 2018. Finance Director Cindy Niemeier explained that the $16,700 amendment was needed to fund the RVI (Real Vision Incorporated) equipment costs, allocate money for use for servers and budget for debt principal and interest in the equipment rental fund for the city’s earlier purchases of a dump truck/sander and a new mower.

“So this is just a shuffling of money?” Councilwoman and Mayor Pro-tem Teresa Overhauser asked.

“Exactly,” Niemeier said. “This is a total shuffling of money.”

In a July 13 email, Niemeier explained that the city has been using RVI for years for a number of IT needs ranging from storing large volume reports for accounting, utility, payroll and capital asset systems as well as scanning documents for use by departments such as the Municipal Court.

“This project moved the files already held from that IBM to a new windows server and is allowing us to expand the storage to the court and to include the city contracts as well,” Niemeier wrote. “Our goal is to be able to provide a link on our website where the public can search for documents, see a PDF of that document and print if they like. That public part of the project does not have the kinks work out yet but I am hopeful in the next fiscal year.”

John McCallum can be reached at [email protected].