County and school division staff hope new policy will prevent the kind of tension that occurred between supervisors and the School Board this budget season.
Stafford County school division and government staff hope a new policy for developing the county’s capital improvement plan will prevent the process from becoming “disjointed.”
That was the word Meg Bohmke, Chair of the Board of Supervisors, used to describe what happened earlier this year, when some supervisors and School Board members sparred over the School Board’s chosen location for the county’s 19th elementary school.
Supervisors on July 2 unanimously approved a resolution to rescind the existing capital improvement plan development policy and replace it with a new one that will “improve direct communication with the School Board,” finance director Andrea Light said.
Under the old process, the school division maintained several lists of capital projects, including rebuilds; new builds; and repair, replacement, and rehabilitation, or 3R, projects.
After School Board approval each October, these lists would be sent to the county’s technical review committee, which would spend about 80 hours, Light said, reviewing the projects and preparing its own recommendations for supervisors.
“This additional resorting and ranking can provide unnecessary complexity and ambiguity which does not aid in decision-making,” county staff wrote in a memo about the new proposed process.
Under the new policy, the school division will prepare two ranked lists of projects — one for “large projects,” defined as projects costing more than $500,000, having a life span of more than 10 years, and requiring land acquisition or construction of a physical facility or public utilities; and one 3R projects, which will “increase the useful life of an existing asset but not fundamentally change the structure or purpose.”
Both lists will go to the County Administrator in October for inclusion in the capital improvement plan for the next fiscal year.
The new process eliminates the technical review committee and instead leaves sorting and prioritizing up to the “subject matter experts” in the school division, Light said.
In order to be included in years one to three of the county’s 10-year capital improvement plan, projects must have a completed cost estimate and land must be acquired, according to the new policy.
Projects that are in years four to six should have land acquisition teams assigned to them to seek property, if needed.
Light said this should present supervisors from not knowing what sites are being considered for future school builds.
“[The capital improvement plan] becomes much more of a promise to the community rather than a living document that’s going to change,” Light said, adding that supervisors do still have the final vote over whether or not to approve the plan each year.
Light said county and school staff worked together to come up with the new policy that “meets the needs of both boards.”
School Board Chair Maureen Siegmund said in a statement that the board is “excited about the simplification of the CIP process.”
“This is going to allow for the School Board’s priorities to remain as we have determined,” she said. “We look forward to collaborating with the Board of Supervisors in our continued work to Elevate Stafford.”
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