It’s that time of the decade when Presque Isle officials start thinking about what kinds of projects to invest in over the next five years and where to find the money.
The Presque Isle City Council started on Aug. 2 what will be a lengthy discussion about the city’s five year capital improvement plan — a discussion that will involve the intersection of complicated local, state, federal and private funding sources and local priorities for a city government.
“If you read really closely, you will cry,” said council chair Emily Smith, joking about the 80-plus page capital improvement plan document.
“I tried to make it as English as possible,” said Pat Webb, the city’s finance director.
According to the capital improvement plan developed by Webb and city department heads, the city is seeking $18.6 million in capital improvement funding through 2022. Of that, about $7.3 million would come from the city’s general fund.
Like other municipal governments trying to avoid property tax increases, Presque Isle has tried to find funds from outside sources for capital investment, such as the state and federal governments and private foundations. Private philanthropists have been instrumental in making possible a number of recent capital projects in Presque Isle, such as the new Sargent Family Community Center and the Turner Memorial Library’s expansion and renovations that started in 2010.
At the same time, “we have not been funding capital at sustainable levels” in an effort to “control increases in the mill rate,” said Presque Isle city manager Martin Puckett in a memo to councilors.
The working document for the capital improvement plan lays out hundreds of different projects and investments that the city could consider funding over the next five years. It lays out descriptions, costs and funding possibilities for everything from maintenance on the Presque Isle bike path to fire and police department equipment.
The document also hints at some of the major decisions that the City Council will have to confront in the coming years, including what to do about the poor state of the City Hall building.
“You’re either going to have improve it or you’re going to have to move,” Webb told the council.
The councilors also started discussion about the possibility of adopting a food sovereignty ordinance, after the passage of a new state law that gives municipalities the ability to allow direct-to-consumer sales of uninspected local food products within their community.
Puckett told councilors that he wanted to start the discussion because a number of Presque Isle residents expressed interest in starting small-scale home-based food businesses.
A local food ordinance could be “an economic development tool” used to help small and startup food producers who may not be able to afford state licensing requirements, Puckett said.
“If you’re starting out and you don’t want to [install] all the major infrastructure to be certified, to put in all the handwashing stations, to do all the things that the state’s requiring, it would allow you to do it,” Puckett said.
In Presque Isle, “there were some people that were selling meals out of their home to neighbors, and they didn’t realize that they had to get all these permits,” he said. “They just wanted to sell meals to their neighbors. The state came in and shut that down.”
So far, 20 municipalities in Maine have enacted food sovereignty ordinances, Puckett said.
After a brief discussion on the pros and cons, the councilors voted to table the discussion of the ordinance. Puckett said that many municipalities are waiting for guidance on developing such ordinances from the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.
City councillor Craig Green said he would like to learn more about the issue.
“I can see the side for having something like this,” he said. “But I can also see … where you would want to have people’s kitchen’s checked, and have safety inspections and have minimum standards.”
