Cedar Hill library, fire hall look for city bond construction money

by Steve Snyder of TODAY Newspapers

Zula B. Wylie Library Director Pat Bonds didn't want to call it a “competition.”

But the library and the Cedar Hill Fire Department may be competing for capital improvement dollars in the coming fiscal year.

At the first of several workshops April 15, the Cedar Hill City Council began the process of sorting out what capital improvement projects to fund and how.

Unfortunately, the city is about $260,000 short of addressing all of the requests it received, outside of using debt-based money.

The winners from current budget funds are fire station and public works office improvements. Pushed off into bond-based funding is a Cedar Hill Museum of History at the Zula B. Wylie Library, along with expansion of the library itself.

For that money, the overall expansion of the library appears to be in conflict with moving Fire Station 2 further north, or both may be in competition with how much street repairs the city does, and how quickly. The top street project is $13 million for Mansfield Road, but that and some other projects will get Dallas County matching money totaling $6 million.

For the library and fire department, it's a question of which gets funded first - an expansion of the library or a relocation of Fire Station 2.

Current budget programs

Fire Chief Steve Pollack was the first presenter at the workshop. He told the council that renovating Fire Station 3 was tops on his list.

“This is my No. 1 priority. Right now, we can barely have three people together in the dayroom,” Fire Chief Steve Pollack said. He said his bare-bones cost on that was $375,000.

Next on his list was renovating Fire Station 1, which is also the site of Cedar Hill Fire Department administration. Total cost on this is $460,000, he said, with more than half of that to add 1,200 square feet of training and meeting space.

“We'll be good for some time,” he said. “I would say this would take me 10 (years down the road).”

A fair amount of upgrade work at both stations will improve male-female privacy issues, Pollack said. Firefighters normally serve 24-hour shifts, making this a priority.

Further down the road, the city may relocate Station 2, but that is not a space-related issue, rather, a service-related issue.

Next, Ruth Antebi-Guten covered public works issues.

“With the move to the Government Center, we're looking at the chance to improve some efficiencies by consolidating operating staff with the Parks Department,” she said.

The current public works facility was built to house 20 employees, she said, and has long since exceeded that.

“We need space for supervisory and technical equipment and three maintenance crews,” she said. “We don't have enough work space, and limited meeting and training space.”

Specifically, she said water/ sewer and streets crew chiefs have limited computer access as well as cramped office space.

She added that Parks and Recreation Department maintenance personnel have never been given coordinated space.

Her solution? Expand the Public Works Service Center to house all Public Works and Parks staff together, with the necessary meeting and training room space included. She presented a proposed floor plan to add 1,700 square feet to the current facility. The project is pegged at $355,000.

For work larger than this, the city may have to decide how much in the way of previously approved bonds to issue.

“We plan on having a bond issue in August or September,” Finance Director Hardy Browder said. “We've got one planned every year for the next three or four years.”

Browder said he would have some more concrete fiscal numbers for the council in two weeks. The council plans another workshop on that date, April 29.

Browder said the amount of money the city needed for street work would be the major restrictor on how much the city could spend in bonds. That will be discussed at the April 29 workshop.

Debt-based funding projects

Other than using the capital improvement funds from the regular budget, the other option for the council besides issuing bonds is to issue certificates of obligation. Browder said the main restriction on use of certificates of obligation was not issuing too small a CO.

And, other than streets, other capital improvements are in the hopper, most notably addition of a city museum to expansion of the library, what funding mechanism to use for that, and the total spending on that. The council was first considering museum costs under capital improvement funds, but the council was talking about lumping that in with bond-based construction costs for the library expansion.

That would free up $300,000, allowing the city to fully fund fire and public works projects.

City Manager Alan Sims informed the council that the original estimate of $4.6 million to expand the library, not counting the cost of a museum, had gone up to $5.1 million. Sims said that was allowances for inflation.

A further complication is that the city has already borrowed $300,000 toward renovating the public works building.

After further discussion, the council developed a consensus that it would fully fund the fire and public works requests out of capital improvements while rolling museum construction into overall library expansion.

That said, the council still discussed basics of library plans. Sims noted library improvement was the No. 1 voter issue on the most recent bond election.

Finally, Chief Pollack gave a presentation on the latest fire department call runs supporting moving Fire Station 2 to a new location at the intersection of Joe Wilson Road and Weaver Street. The city has 9 acres at the site. Pollack said a station there, on 2 acres of that land, would cost about $3.4 million.

In the long term, Pollack said that building a fifth station on the far south side, near the location of Loop 9, when it is built, would take care of city fire needs.

“Our goal is to deliver service within six minutes 90 percent of the time,” he said.

The current Station 2 building would be converted into a training academy.

The library expansion and fire station relocation could compete for bond money, but Browder said an alternative was to borrow money for just design costs for the new fire station.

The bottom line is that the city could issue about $9.9 million in debt in fiscal 2009 without increasing taxes and $6.7 million the year after that, Browder said, per very tentative numbers he had to offer the council. He said, based on street impact numbers and street projects to be discussed at an April 29 workshop, those numbers could changed somewhat. Whatever they change to won't be “firm” numbers until he gets preliminary appraisal values from the Dallas County Appraisal District in May.

Browder also cautioned that, for the next couple of years, the growth in city tax revenues is going to slow.

“Our housing market problems aren't near getting solved, and until they are, you're not going to get new appraisals,” he said. “After we come out of that, we could get faster growth, but I don't know when we're going to come out.”