Guest Column: East Columbia annexation plan must include cost estimates

If you were not at Old Hawthorne on Nov 17, you missed an important meeting. This was the first in a series of stakeholders’ meetings for the East Columbia Area Plan But, let’s be honest. Why should you care?

Here’s why: The ECAP covers 25 square miles (16,000 acres) that the city is opening up for voluntary annexation. Now let’s be clear; I do agree with city planning. But the city is not even estimating what it would cost to the citizens of Columbia for providing services to these annexed areas.

As an example of the current budgeting policy of our city government, you might look at the voluntary annexation of 271 acres on Richland Road that was just tabled by the City Council. The official public city fiscal impact calculated by staff for this project was: zero.

No, this is not a typo.

Zero dollars to cover such things as sewer, water, roads, intersections, trails, fire stations, snow removal, street cleaning and so on.

So again, why should you care?

Do you support additional city funding for the Humane Society or the construction of a Farmers Market pavilion? Maybe you just want the leaking sewer in your backyard fixed. Maybe you think the roads should be cleared of snow in a timely manner. Maybe you think that providing well-funded social services is important. Maybe you feel that a well-funded police force is important.

Well, sorry. All the money needed to accomplish these things might very well be used to provide minimum city services to newly annexed areas. Worse yet, because there is currently no public planning or budgeting for these costs, there is not much that you can do to argue about it.

The city’s policy, and how the city’s staff members interpret this policy, is the following: If the costs of annexation/development are not immediate and clearly attributable to one project, and if there is a possibility of future revenue coming from the project area, then the near-term cost estimate to provide city services is deemed to be zero. There is no long-term cost estimate.

In business terms, the developer and city manager (vendor and CEO) propose a project to the City Council (board of directors). Say, for instance, you have a factory that makes widgets. Their argument is that because widgets will eventually sell and bring in revenue, the cost of a new widget factory is zero. The long-term profitability of widget production (providing city services to sparse development in many areas) based on sales revenue (revenue from fees and taxes) is ignored. From a budgeting perspective, the money will be taken out of various other accounts with the promise that some time in the future it will all balance out — just as it is being done here.

To get back to the meeting, I asked people to take a little time out of their busy schedules, come to Old Hawthorne and voice a common goal: Timely and complete estimates of costs to provide city services to the East Columbia Area Plan region will be part of the planning process from the very beginning.

The turnout of 100 citizens, whether it had anything whatsoever to do with my outreach efforts, was impressive for a rainy night on which there were many other interesting and important meetings. There seemed to be a fairly even representation of different stakeholders including owners of land in the area (both large and small tracts), developers (again, both large and small), paid lobbyists and some county residents who just wanted to see what they might be facing soon. Overall, there was a fair representation of Columbia residents from across the city, including some who might just have been interested because they will be asked to foot the bill for this little project.

The format of the meeting was what has become standard for stakeholder meetings. The mantra of goals, objectives and strategies was explained, and we broke up into smaller groups around six tables with the task of defining goals in the general topic areas of infrastructure, environment and land use.

At the table I participated in, there were representatives from all the stakeholder groups I mentioned above except paid lobbyists, I believe. The facilitation from the city planning staff and the volunteer Planning and Zoning commissioners made this all work very smoothly.

This meeting was a great start for a type of planning process that is new to Columbia, but complete and public cost estimates for providing city services have to be included somewhere in this process. How and when these costs will be assessed has to be determined.

We have talented planning staff and P&Z commissioners who can do this. Now it is up to the City Council to set policies in place that will dictate inclusion of these costs in the public process.