KALAMAZOO (WKZO-AM)–Kalamazoo City Commissioners have a template for how to allocate ten million dollars from the Foundation for Excellence grant to pay for community improvement and aspirational projects. They learned last night that they just have to work the plan.
At a City Hall workshop, Manager Jim Ritsema and his staff showed how when they combine commissioner input, the community input from Imagine Kalamazoo 2025 and put it through their Priority Based Budgeting matrix, they should come up with a plan that will not only make the best use of the money in the short run, but the long run as well.
Mayor Bobby Hopewell noted that while tackling huge issues like intergenerational poverty and shared prosperity are important goals, they will also require a lot of planning.
Commissioners will meet during a retreat on March 4th to narrow down funding for the first year, and they may focus the money on “shovel ready projects” like sidewalks and road improvements and on programs that they know work, like the city’s summer youth employment project, and non-profits working on the poverty issue who have had success but limited funding.
They may also allocate money to begin planning on how to tackle the bigger issues.
That spending will be authorized by an amendment to the 2017 city budget, when the plan is ready. Hopewell says the budget amendment could come out of that retreat, but may not.
Vice Mayor Don Cooney, who has been a persistent advocate for poverty programs says he concedes that they will need to get a comprehensive plan in place first if they want to tackle the high rate of poverty in the city, and is happy with the general strategy they have agreed to follow.
Professor Cooney says there are communities that are already doing this work, and there are models to borrow and best practices to apply. They just have to customize them to address Kalamazoo’s particular needs and problems.
To make that long term strategy work, there is a much larger job that will have to be completed. That will be raising the half-billion dollars its projected the city will need to make the Foundation for Excellence a permanent source of funding for Kalamazoo City operations.
Right now they are operating on a $70-million grant from a couple of local billionaires to make the transition.
To raise that endowment, they will need the community’s support, and to maintain that support, they have to make this aspirational effort work, and something the community is convinced is worthwhile to continue.
The next step begins March 4th.
