City adopts budget, rejects inclusion effort

SANDPOINT — City Council members approved the fiscal year 2020 budget on Wednesday, but not before removing the mayor’s controversial inclusion initiative.

With the removal of the $8,000 initiative, the budget totaled $39,314,035, a decrease of $5,224,904 from the current year’s budget.

The inclusion initiative, for which Mayor Shelby Rognstad proposed to “eliminate hate and discrimination, and strengthen social equity,” has drawn criticism in recent weeks that it would only cause the division that Rognstad aimed to eliminate. Before approving the budget, Councilman Joel Aispuro made the motion to remove the initiative.

“As a minority living in Sandpoint, Idaho, since 1995, I would like to express my thoughts and opinions,” Aispuro said. “As a human, I believe we all come from different backgrounds. Although we are different in many ways, we are very much the same. I believe we want to be valued, I believe we want to be heard, seen and we all want to be safe. Whether that is with our spouses, our friends, our children, our co-workers, etc., and I am all for that.

“However, this is not a way to implement kindness. This initiative is a very slippery slope in my opinion. I believe hate and disagreement are often fused into one category, when in fact they are separate. I can disagree with someone and not hate them. We don’t need government for this kindness — kindness starts where you and I are sitting.”

Rognstad, who was absent from the meeting as he was on his honeymoon, had detailed the initiative in an article last month where he wrote, “White supremacy threatens community well-being, public safety and it is bad for our economy. If left unchallenged, it attracts more of the problem, it threatens our community identity as a safe place to live and raise a family, it threatens our quality of life and our future welfare.”

The rest of the budget remained the same as in the preliminary budget adopted by council last month. City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton recapped a number of capital she outlined during the Aug. 7 City Council meeting, as detailed in an Aug. 10 Daily Bee article as well.

Stapleton focused much of her presentation Wednesday on impact fees, as she said there has been some misinformation in the community regarding the funds.

“This isn’t something new that we are doing this year,” Stapleton said of budgeting the impact fees. “What is new is a substantially larger amount of the impact fees are budgeted, particularly in the parks area.”

Impact fees are developed via a development impact fee study, Stapleton said, with the last one completed in 2011.

“It was a document that not only contained the impact fee study itself, but it also functioned as our capital improvement plan,” she said. “So it is very different from what we are looking at developing out of our master planning efforts currently. It was a 5- to 10-year capital improvement plan, so we are within that time frame. We are now looking at doing a 20-year capital improvement plan.”

Impact fees are collected in four categories — Parks and Recreation, police, fire and transportation — and must be expended within eight years, Stapleton said. The Parks and Recreation fees are collected for park land acquisition, park improvements and recreation facilities.

“Essentially, it allows us as those fees are coming in and we have needs for either land acquisition, park improvements or a recreation facility, we can incrementally spend those dollars,” Stapleton said.

For police, impact fees are collected for the police station and communications infrastructure. Fire includes fire stations and storage, as well as apparatus and equipment. In the transportation category, fees are used for streets and intersections, and multiuse pathways.

“Our streets and intersection projects were specifically identified in our capital improvement plan, so our transportation impact fees for streets can only be used for those projects,” Stapleton said. “... We have budgeted impact fees in this current year’s budget anticipating that we are going to finalize a transportation master plan, which will result in new capital improvements.”

The current budget, Stapleton said, is primarily focused on master planning in accordance with the strategic plan adopted by council members last year.

All of the master plans are underway, or will be getting underway shortly, with the goal of having all completed by late March or early April 2020, Stapleton said. In anticipation of completing those master plans and development of the capital improvement plan, the city budgeted for an impact fee study. There is also an Impact Fee Advisory Committee meeting slated for Sept. 18, she said. The committee is primarily made up of the Planning and Zoning Commission, with two additional members from real estate and development. Anyone from real estate and development interested in serving on the committee can contact City Hall for an application.

All budget documents can be found on the city’s website at sandpointidaho.gov.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.