Discussion over the use of the city of Homer’s road fund in order to purchase heavy road equipment got quite a bit of debate at Monday night’s city council meeting. At the heart of the issue was the Homer Accelerated Roads and Trails fund, which was the listed source of funding for a new road grader and sanding truck, which had a combined total cost of nearly a half-million dollars.
Mayor Ken Castner was adamant that the HART Fund was not a suitable source of funding for road equipment. He pulled out the original resolution creating HART and quoted it during the Committee of the Whole meeting.
“Whereas a dedicated funding source for Road and Trail construction Improvement and maintenance will establish these activities as essential in funding, to continue to maintain and improve the city transportation infrastructure. And then it lists all those purposes. I'm reading the, the ordinance 20. ordinance 1710 SA, This is the actual ordinance that passed and this is what went before the voters. So, I mean, there's really, I, I'm going to have a hard time accepting that you guys are going to sit here and amend what the, what the voters voted for. If you guys want to start spending money to buy equipment out of HART. I guarantee I won't be a supporter of extending the program because that's not the, the purpose,” Castner said.
Castner threatened to veto the equipment purchases if they used HART funds, which Councilwoman Rachel Lord said was unhelpful.
“I hear you have strong feelings about it. There is a lot of documentation that we have just received. There's a long history. There are a lot of conversations about this, you have strong opinions, others have strong opinions, the department has strong opinions. That's great, just like we've had this conversation with many other topics, we can have that respectfully and candidly without throwing one another under the bus. So I really hope that we can have this conversation without threats of veto. And, and all of that, that has come along with other conversations we've had, it's absolutely unnecessary,” Lord said.
Later, during the regular city council meeting, Lord offered an amendment to the ordinances replacing HART funds with unrestricted funds from the General Fund, though wasn’t thrilled at doing so.
“As a rule, this is not great. It's not a great idea, at, the general fund, and the sun fund balance is not a slush fund. I don't believe as a council member. I don't want to be using the unassigned fund balance. No matter how big it is, to be covering expenses kind of on a play by play basis. I want a better plan for doing that through our Karma planning and what have you. But given where we are with our Fleet needs, and the questions that we have regarding HART both from a policy and from, a, an accounting standpoint. I think this is a clean move. I think it's a justifiable move. I agree that there are funds there and I think it's a way to get us forward and we can continue having the HART conversation, you know, without worrying about the timing of needing to order a grader,” Lord said.
The price of the grader was actually lower than was in the ordinance, which was for $400,000, but since the purchase won’t show up for another year, City Manager Rob Dumouchel suggested, and the mayor agreed, that prices are volatile enough that the higher figure was left in place.
“My, my preference is given how things have occurred across last year, is to keep it at that $400,000 level, I would love to find an even better deal and give a bunch of money back to the general fund at the end of this. But we've had a number of things fall through on us before and I don't want to come back and have this conversation a second time over. A 5 percent increase or something like that,” Dumouchel said.
The second piece of equipment the council said okay to was a 2-ton Ford F-550 that will be used for road sanding.
