Villa pulls Capital Projects budget proposal from agenda

By Doug Spoon, Editor

An agenda item to approve the City of Menifee’s updated five-year Capital Improvement Program – which includes the Holland Road Overpass project – was pulled from consideration by city manager Armando Villa at Wednesday night’s City Council meeting.

The CIP document has gone through two previous City Council reviews and was labeled as “final draft” in Wednesday’s agenda packet. When asked by council members to explain why the item was being pulled, Villa said there are “a lot of resolutions made at mid-year that we need to close the gap on.”

Asked afterward, Villa would not elaborate on adjustments being considered, or whether any of the changes would affect the budget for the Holland Road Overpass, a long-awaited bridge over the 215 Freeway to alleviate traffic problems. News articles in Menifee 24/7 have questioned the accuracy of funding budget figures and have asked how up-front construction costs would be paid by the City before reimbursement from Riverside County funding sources.

Villa said in a June 9 news article that “we’re not there yet” regarding the identification of funding for up-front costs. On Wednesday night, he said that such up-front costs are usually paid from the City’s reserve fund or from other areas of the general fund, and that “not everything in the budget is money in the bank.” He said it was impossible to designate a certain amount for those costs in a budget line item because the exact amount needed is not known.

He could not explain how that is different from the recently approved $454,000 contract for the design of an amphitheater in Menifee Town Center’s Central Park. That document included an estimated total design and construction cost of $3.9 million, which is not yet approved and which is only an estimate because it has not been sent out to bid. Yet an exact total of $3,932,760 has been allocated to cover the project.

Villa did admit that a $2.1 million portion of that allocation from a payment to the City in its new contract with Waste Management did not have to be used for a parks project, although he suggested it be used as a “community benefit”. He said the entire $3 million payment from Waste Management could’ve been kept in a reserve account. What’s unclear is how it was first proposed to be included in the amphitheater project, and who proposed it.

The earliest the CIP plan could be approved by the City Council is at its July 7 meeting.