My Meeting with the Oakridge Daytimers

Five lessons from a straw poll

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking in front of the Oakridge Daytimers. The Daytimers are a women’s social organization composed of residents in the Oakridge neighborhood. The ladies invited me to come provide them with an annual briefing on what is happening around the City of Garland and with the City Council. 

I explained how the two-step City budgeting process works— split between Operating Budget and the Capital Improvement Budget (CIP)—and informed them about several items we are currently considering in the proposed Capital Improvement Plan.

Sidebar - Your City Council will be spending this Saturday in a work session hearing from various city departments about their capital requests for this year and dissecting this document page by page. Some people make fun of , but within these 354 pages is $559.3 million spending of your tax dollars. I highly encourage you to read it to see how your tax money is spent.

I told the Daytimers that this is the process whereby projects approved by voters in our 2019 Bond Election or by department heads receive funding. For example, the Holford Recreation Center has project costs spread over multiple years. Approximately $11 million has already been spent on the project with just over $22 million to be spent this year. The estimated remaining cost of $8.6 million must be allocated in a future CIP budget—likely next year—to complete the project on schedule.

(Page 80 of the proposed CIP budget document)

---

For the last part of my presentation, I spoke about our upcoming bond study committee and how they must decide to allocate our limited funds across our many city needs. To mimic this process, I asked each of the 21 ladies present to take 10 beads out of a bucket and place it in one of seven marked jars. Each jar represented a different area of need within the city which is typically funded by a bond proposition. The jars were labeled as follows:

• Parks

• Libraries

• Public Facilities

• Drainage

• Neighborhoods

• Roads

• Economic Development

They could place as many beads into each jar as they wished to represent the areas they believe needed the most funding.

---

Unsurprisingly Roads received the most beads with 44, followed by Economic Development with 32. You can see the full results here:

(Why the totals don’t add up to a multiple of 10, I don’t know. Someone must not have followed directions!)

(Besides all the wonderful CIP projects we will soon approve in the CIP document, one other thing I am very happy about is we finally got rid of the misleading 3D pie graphs and replaced them with 2D versions.)

---

What these straw poll results mean to me are several things:

1. With every jar receiving a significant number of beads, there are many needs within the city.

2. While investing $30 million a year into streets is slowly improving our citywide Pavement Condition Index, there is still a great demand to keep fixing the condition of our roadways.

3. The appetite for city-led Economic Development activity is still strong. The City has done some with the $46 million of funding provided in the 2019 Bond, but we still can do much more. MUCH MORE, but we have to spend our dollars smartly!

4. Parks and Neighborhoods received the exact same number of beads tying for third place in the rankings. There is strong support for for improving our park facilities and neighborhoods through our Neighborhood Vitality investments.

5. Libraries received less support than I would have expected. Perhaps the investments we have already made including rebuilding the West Garland Library (formerly Walnut Creek Branch Library), renovating North Garland and Central libraries, and installing kiosks around town are paying off.

---

Overall it was a great meeting and I’m glad they were able to provide me with some insight into our citizens’ needs just as I was able to inform them about our wonderful City.

---

Given I was speaking with the Oakridge Daytimers, here’s a song named by a band of the same name Daytimers called “Pat’s Song.” All I know about them is they are a rock band from the “Gem City” aka Dayton, Ohio.