WAUPUN — The City of Waupun is in a bind regarding how to go about completing several major city infrastructure projects.
The matter was discussed Tuesday night at the most recent City Council meeting.
A list of outstanding capital expenditures were presented to the Council, including both planned and unplanned expenses that need immediate attention from the City. These included: elevator failure at City Hall, replacement of DPW Truck damaged in an accident, roof replacement project at City Hall, tuckpointing project at Museum, hail damaged roof at DPW Garage, Aquatic Center pool heater repairs, Fire Engine Turbo Repair, and Fire Squad Air Conditioning System.
While most of these have been known to the City for some time, many are recent developments of over the last few months, leaving the City with several unplanned expenditures.
The most troubling is the recent elevator failure at City Hall, which was caused by an electrical storm that fried the elevator’s circuitboard which Mayor Bishop mentioned in his recent Mayor’s Column. The City looked into replacing the circuitboard, but found that a refurbished aftermarket circuitboard would cost about $13,000 to procure and install.
Due to the age of the elevator, the Council considered replacing the elevator entirely with a new modern one. After a bit of discussion the Council voted to replace the elevator entirely, with a short-term replacement that will continue providing ADA access to the rest of City Hall. This project was quoted at no more than $124,789 and was noted to be eligible for the City’s borrowing strategy.
“We’re committed to this building and we can’t go without it,” Alderman Dan Siebers said about the elevator.
The City is currently unaware of any other damage from the recent storm, but the roof still needs to be replaced among many other renovations to the City Hall building.
“If you come to City Hall and do your business, you’re not going to see a lot of the failings here, but if you really take your time and you walk around the building, you’ll see the issues,” said Public Works Director Jeff Daane. “The steps are in bad condition, they’re deteriorating. The ones on the east side are even starting to lean away from the building and starting to crack. Some of the tuck pointing is getting very bad here. And there’s like a stucco finish on the south side of the building and that’s really starting to fail and fall off. So if we don’t get something done soon here at City Hall, there’s going to be a lot of water infiltration and it’s going to cause a lot more damage in the long term.”
Other city buildings including the Public Works garage were also damaged during the hailstorms earlier this summer.
Mayor of Waupun Bishop expressed frustration about the lack of progress on several projects during the Council meeting. Mayor Bishop has been pushing hard to approve projects and when things aren’t done he’s the one who gets flak for it from members of the community.
The primary holdup on these projects is simply a lack of funds. These projects are expensive and the City of Waupun does not have enough flexibility in the budget to cover everything at once. Several other projects that the City needed to cover ate up a lot of that budget, including issues with the Waupun Ice Arena cooling system that were discovered in May.
Despite this, the City still needs to finish these projects, leading Mayor Bishop to propose taking out loans to cover the costs of long term projects.
“It’s time we get some of these projects crossed off and they’re only getting more expensive with time,” Mayor Bishop said. “We kick too many things down the road and I feel like they’re all landing on me now.”
On whether he was worried about the long term financial responsibility of such a decision, he said that Waupun could handle it and maintain costs for the future.
“Waupun has always been a frugal and smart community—and I wouldn’t change that—but there’s some times where you just have to take out debt to get a project done,” Mayor Bishop said following the meeting. “Take the fire truck for example, it’d be a 20-year loan on a fire truck that we’ll have for 30 to 35 years and then the one thing I would say is to whoever the mayor is 20 years from now, when the fire truck gets paid off, keep sending money aside and then when you get to the 30-year mark, I need a new fire truck you’ve got 10 years worth of a down payment.”
This sort of plan has precedent in Waupun, as when Bob Reinap was mayor and the City finished paying off the 15 year loans for the Safety Building around the year 2000/2001, they continued to put money aside like the payments never stopped. Then in 2009/2010 when the City needed to expand the Safety Building they had the money there for it.
“While it’s frustrating that all these projects are coming due at the same time, the good news is we’ve been smart in the past,” Mayor Bishop said. “We have the credit, we have the room to borrow the money while being fiscally sound, and we’re not overextending ourselves in any way.”
During the meeting Bishop expressed his intent to call a special meeting of the Common Council to tackle these issues, which is likely to take place sometime this September.
Another potential holdup is the City dragging its feet on the Purchasing Policy, which was last seen as a draft discussion back in March.
Several members of the Council took a tour of City Hall to see the areas of concern following Tuesday’s meeting.
