The West Plains City Council on Monday approved several resolutions and adopted a five-year capital improvement plan for the city.
Council members, during their regularly scheduled meeting at City Hall, first adopted a capital improvement plan for the city that must be approved by council members as part of the city’s budget process.
West Plains Finance Director Earlene Rich said the plan is part of the city’s budget requirements and charter and is “a resolution instead of an ordinance, which is why you didn’t see this last month when we did the ordinances for the budget.”
“This is a resolution because it’s a plan. It’s not an actual law,” Rich said.
According to Rich, the planning and fiscal management process coordinates the location, timing, and financing of the city’s capital improvement needs over five years and is a product of the capital improvement program.
According to Rich, once projects have been identified and priorities have been established the city must determine which revenue streams are best suited to fund each project.
The city uses various funding sources for projects within the capital improvement plan, including capital improvement sales tax, transportation sales tax, hotel and motel tax, and utility revenues and grants.
The city council voted unanimously to adopt the capital improvement plan, which covers projects the city has planned through fiscal 2026.
Members of the community can view the roughly 70-page plan online at westplains.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/CIP-Plan-2022-2026-Web.pdf.
The city council then approved a resolution authorizing the city administrator to execute a lease agreement between the city of West Plains and the West Plains Civic Center Board, the lessor, and the Board of Governors of Missouri State University, the lessee.
West Plains Civic Center Director, Eryn Walters, introduced the resolution to the city council and said the Civic Center Board approved the annual lease agreement between the Civic Center and Missouri State University-West Plains during the board’s February meeting.
“This will be the first year that we have increased it since the pandemic. The last two years, we agreed to just be good partners with our university to keep it at zero instead of rising with the Consumer Price Index. And as you guys have seen, it rose by 7 percent this year,” Walters said.
“To not increase it by that much, our board decided to do a 3.5 percent increase, which would raise their annual agreement from $110,707 to $114,582,” Walters said.
The city council voted to approve the lease agreement, which leases office and storage space for the university’s athletic teams on the second floor of the Civic Center and the use of event and meeting space as scheduled for certain university functions.
The amount is to be paid in twelve monthly payments of $9,548 with the first payment due in July, according to the agreement.
City councilors then heard from West Plains zoning administrator, Dustin Harrison, who introduced a request to approve a complete streets plan brought to the city from members of the West Plains Bike Group and presented to the planning and zoning commission.
Harrison said the resolution for the complete streets plan would allow the city to take all modes of transportation into consideration when moving forward with any new road construction.
The plan’s vision is that “every public street, walkway and greenways trail right-of-way in West Plains should be planned, designed, constructed, maintained and operated to the fullest extent feasible to provide a transportation system such that all users will have transportation options to safely and conveniently travel to their destinations.”
According to the plan, the transportation system in the city should accommodate all users, including pedestrians with different abilities, bicycles, motorized two-wheel vehicles, automobiles, buses and trucks.
Individual streets and off-street transportation facilities would serve different functions and user needs that would require flexibility in planning and design to balance the needs and unique circumstances of all street users and the surrounding neighborhoods and activity centers.
The complete streets policy would further guide the development of a transportation system that creates a network for all modes of travel and includes all roadways and trails within the community that encourages multiple connections to destinations.
“Each phase in the life of a roadway, including planning, design, construction, rehabilitation, restoration, operations, and maintenance will be an opportunity to improve the integration of all transportation modes into the roadway,” according to the plan.
The plan directs the city transportation director to review all policies, standards, and design guidelines for the construction of streets and public improvement plans for street construction and provide analysis and recommendations to the planning department regarding conforming to the complete streets policy.
The city council approved the plan on its first reading.
