Camas officials kick off 2023-24 budget process, field $73M worth of needs, wants

In the run-up to approving the city of Camas’ 2023-24 biennial budget by the end of this year, members of the Camas City Council are taking a deep dive into the staff positions, equipment and projects listed as most critical by the city’s department heads.

The Council has already taken a “high level” look at $73 million worth of capital and operating expenses Camas Mayor Steve Hogan could include in his proposed 2023-24 budget, and plan to have more in-depth conversations — including possible revenue sources for each request — over the next few months. 

“We start out at a very high level and put out a lot of information,” the city’s finance director, Cathy Huber Nickerson, told Council members in early August. “As the budget process gets closer and closer, we fine-tune it … as we get closer to adoption, we will marry up the revenues and expenditure — are they sustainable? — and also look at other options available to Council. We try to whittle it down for you … and we break it down into types of expenditure sources, types of revenue sources, to help Council and the public understand.” 

Council members in Camas are not used to seeing all of the department heads’ various needs and wants so well in advance of the mayor’s proposed biennial budget, which will come out in October, but Mayor Hogan said during the Council’s Aug. 1 workshop that he wanted to give city officials and the community more information going into the 2023-24 budget process. 

“What I asked staff to do was to list everything they needed instead of thinking, ‘Oh, what can we afford?’” Hogan told the Council on Aug. 1. “We have found ourselves in a situation where we could only afford ‘X, Y, Z’ in the past and now we have (critical infrastructure needs).”
The mayor asked his department heads to list all of the items that would help move the city forward and address pressing issues with staffing, equipment, building needs and projects the community has deemed important. 

All of the projects listed in the capital and operating budget packages that have come before the city council in August fall into four categories, Hogan said: those that are critical or failing and must be addressed; those that relate to compliance or legally mandated issues; those the the city needs to minimize risk; and those that are at the discretion of city department heads and might be considered to be things that are more “wants” than “needs.”

In the past, “when Council received the budget from the mayor, they didn’t know what the universe looked like,” Huber Nickerson explained. “This is purely informational, so (the Council) can understand what the mayor’s budget looks like … we’re trying to address questions Council had on budget issues and also trying to engage the public, to see where their interests lie.” 

The Council has had three meetings on possible 2023-24 budget packages — at Council workshops on Aug. 1 and Aug. 15 and during a morning budget presentation workshop on Aug. 5 — and has another budget-related meeting set for 9 a.m. Friday Aug. 19, to discuss more operating packages, including requests from the city’s Parks and Recreation Department. 

The budget packages that have come before the Council in August include: 

• $36 million in capital requests from the city’s fire/EMS, library, parks and recreation, police and technology departments; 
• $30 million in capital requests related to the city’s public works department;  and 
• At least $6.87 million in operating requests — including staff, tools and equipment, repairs and maintenance, professional services and training — from the city’s various departments. 

Huber Nickerson said the Council is expected to hear more about the city’s 2023-24 revenue forecast and talk about long-range planning and sustainability in September. The mayor will release his proposed 2023=24 budget in October with what Huber Nickerson described as “some, if not all of these packages, in there.” The Council will have more in-depth discussions and hold public hearings on the mayor’s proposed budget toward the end of the year, in November and December, and will likely adopt the 2023-24 biennium budget in early December. 

Some of the items included in the Council’s budget discussions so far include: 

• Crown Park renovations — The city’s Parks and Recreation Department is requesting $6.3 million to implement the first two phases of a 2018 Crown Park Master Plan, which would include an interactive water feature, inclusive playground equipment, a permanent restroom, some more accessible pathways for visitors with disabilities, a flexible lawn area, outdoor amphitheater, sport court, access improvements to Scout Hall, and upgrades to the park’s irrigation system and stormwater management gardens. 
• Lacamas Creek trailhead improvements — Parks and Recreation also has requested $1.1 million to add “much needed user capacity and amenities to the Camas trail system” at the 0.5-acre South Lacamas Creek Trailhead, with improvements the public said were important during the city’s recent Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces (PROS) Plan update — more park and trailhead restrooms and picnic areas — as well as improvements to the trailhead’s lighting, the addition of a 25-space asphalt parking lot, accessible pathways, a picnic area, new plantings and stormwater improvements.
• New police positions — The Camas Police Department has requested $515,000 to hire two new police officers — to start midway through 2023. “Due to the extremely long hiring and officer training time for a police officer position, we are never able to truly be at our authorized force,” police department administrators noted in their communications with Council. “This creates low staffing levels for the community, mandates that other employees work overtime to fill the voids and causes employee burnout.” The two “overhire” positions would help fill in staffing gaps while the city is hiring and training new officers. The police department also requested $605,000 to hire two first-line supervisors — police sergeants — to increase the department’s supervision of on-patrol officers. Police Chief Mitch Lackey has said the department has “many hours of each day” without any on-duty supervisors. 

• Fire department positions — The Camas-Washougal Fire Department has requested $1,427,100 to hire 12 firefighters, at a cost of $118,925 per firefighter, to staff the department’s three front-line fire engines with a three-person engine crew. The department currently staffs fire engines with a minimum of two people. Increasing to a three-person engine crew would allow CWFD to have faster deployment of life-saving equipment such as the “Jaws of Life” necessary to extricate people from vehicle crashes, the rope rescue system used in rescues at hard-to-access areas like Camas’ “potholes,” and devices used to resuscitate victims in cardiac arrest.

• New fire engines — The fire department has also requested $1.74 million for the purchase of two new fire engines. 

• Fire station replacements — The mayor and city council also must consider requests for $9.4 million and $13.9 million to replace the Camas-Washougal Fire Department’s Station 43 in Washougal and Station 41 in downtown Camas. A recent CWFD facilities analysis — which noted that Station 41, the fire department’s headquarters, would not withstand a 9.0 earthquake event — found that both stations should be replaced in the next three years.  According to CWFD administrators, “fire station 43, located in Washougal, is in need of immediate replacement” and “is experiencing escalating maintenance and repair costs that are unable to be mitigated within the current facility structure. Failure to replace the station may require relocation of personnel and equipment … which would require considerable costs and logistical obstacles.” Fire Station 41 also is in need of “immediate replacement,” the administrators noted in their documents sent to the Council. “Station 41 would become the fire department headquarters station, located in the core of the department’s response area and would house response personnel and apparatuses, administrative staff and the fire marshal’s office.” 

• “Children’s Learning Hive” at Camas Public Library — The library has requested $630,000 to build a new children’s educational area in unused space within the library. “Families have returned to the library post-COVID in droves,” library administrators noted in their communications with Council. “While it’s impossible to increase the square footage of the library, it is possible to improve the existing space to maximize the value families receive when they visit.” The new “learning hive” would include an early learning center for the library’s youngest visitors and their caregivers to “instill a love of reading and encourage literacy through imagination,” as well as a STEM lab for schoolchildren to increase their science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills. The “hive” also would repurpose the library’s courtyard into “a usable space for rotating events, which include experiments, messy crafts and sensory tables” with a retractable awning and heat lamps that would extend the courtyard’s use throughout the year and add an ADA-accessible entrance to the courtyard area for patrons with disabilities. 

•  Cyber threat management, detection and response — the city’s information technology (IT) department has requested  $200,000 to purchase Critical Insight, “a cloud-based … software (that) allows businesses to mitigate and identify potential cyber threats and issues” and “real-time response” to cyber threats. In their communication with the city council, IT administrators said “in the event of a cyber threat, it could take the city days, weeks, months to recover, resulting in exponential costs and potential leak(s) or loss(es) of citizen data to malicious parties. Without having visibility to cyber threats in the wild and real-time monitoring, we will not be able to proactively thwart or block these threats before  they become widespread or make their way into our environment.”

• Adding an engineering manager — The city’s community development department has asked for $175,000 to hire an engineering manager to help relieve its existing staff, especially Camas’ city engineer, who is currently providing oversight for the community development engineering team as well as the city’s public works capital team. “It’s a lot,” said Camas Public Works Director Steve Wall during the Council’s Aug. 5 budget workshop. “There’s too much on (the city engineer’s) plate.” The new position is one of the more critical asks, Wall said, noting that, as Camas continues to transition from a small city to a bigger city with more activity, the city’s community development team “is trying to cover too many things.” Wall added that the city engineer often works 45 to 50 hours a week and, without other managers to take on some of his workload, has trouble taking vacation time, “which can lead to burnout, loss of productivity, slower response times to internal and external customers and a challeng(ing work-life) balance.”

Council considers subarea planning in city’s downtown

The Council also discussed operations needs during a budget workshop on Aug. 5, and will hear more of the city’s operations needs this week, during a workshop that begins at 9 a.m. Friday, Aug. 19. 

One of the operating budget package considerations Council members discussed during the Aug. 5 workshop concerned the possibility of spending $425,000 for subarea planning in the city’s downtown area — much like the subarea planning being done in Camas’ mostly undeveloped North Shore area. 

Community Development Department administrators stated in their notes to Council that city councilors have “expressed a desire to engage in a subarea plan for the downtown area” in the past, so they included $425,000 for consultants in their proposed operating budget packages. “Subarea planning is a highly involved effort that requires community visioning and engagement, market research, design work, mapping and deliverables that can include maps, new ordinances … and budget planning,” city staff stated, adding that the city’s two-phase subarea plan for the North Shore cost over $379,000. 

“Using a 10 percent factor for inflation over the last three years, that puts the total at about $417,875, which is why staff is recommending $425,000 for the downtown subarea plan,” the staff stated in their report to Council.  

Some Council members wondered what areas might be included in the subarea plan, but Camas’ interim city administrator, Jeff Swanson, said the area would still need to be defined. 

“This is just the budgeting,” Swanson said during the Aug. 5 workshop. “We don’t have the area defined yet. That would be part of the scope of work.” 

Council members also wondered if the plan would include the Georgia-Pacific paper mill properties in the city’s downtown area, but Robert Maul, the city’s planning manager, said city leaders officials and staff “have had regular communication with managers at the mill, and we want them to be a part of this process, but they’ve made it clear they do not want their properties to be included in this, and that’s something we’ve honored.” 

Councilman Don Chaney asked if the city would be able to do subarea planning in the downtown core without considering the mill properties — or include the areas without the mill owner’s permission. 

“We’ve told the mill folks that doing subarea planning doesn’t mean you have to stop what you’re doing, but, if (they) do, there could be underlying land-use changes that would allow them to market the property for other uses,” Swanson said. 

“If the mill doesn’t want to be a part of it, so be it, but … there aren’t any agreements that prevent planning,” Mayor Hogan said. “This is an opportunity for us to look at how we could enhance this area and make our downtown area expand. I don’t want to wait for dioxins to be studied on that 600 acres and figure out how to deal with them. The time is now to address how we can enhance the community and make it livable for people.”
Hogan has said the downtown area — as well as the city’s North Shore — may be perfect areas for Camas to add more affordable housing in the city. 

Councilwoman Bonnie Carter said she believed many people in the community would expect the mill properties to be a part of any subarea planning the city might do in the downtown area. 

“If we go through this process and don’t include the mill property because of the wants of the owner, there would be (some) questioning of the use of resources,” Carter said. 

Swanson explained that subarea planning would include zoning changes on some downtown properties, so it “really must include the consent of property owners.”
Though the city’s subarea planning downtown might state aspirations for the mill property, Swanson cautioned that the mill owners – a subsidiary of Koch Industries — “has the right to sell that property to someone else with the existing zoning that’s on it and that property has the right to continue (as a business operating under the current heavy industrial zoning) in perpetuity.” 

Maul said the mill “has been good to the city,” donating land and selling property to the city “at really low prices” and said the paper mill “put Camas on the map.” 

“We could do a whole subarea plan on top of their property, but you want partnership and collaboration,” Maul said. “I understand the excitement to do what Vancouver and other cities have done with these cool waterfront opportunities, but this will take a lot of time … We’re talking about a long time, depending on the depth and severity of pollutants (at the mill site).” 

Swanson added that the $425,000 for subarea planning was something the city needed to do right away or during the 2023-24 budget cycle. 

“This one is a pretty solid ‘four,’” Swanson said, referring to the city’s four-tier ranking system for the types of budget package decisions, with a “four” being something that was more of a “want” than a “need.” 

“This is discretionary,” Swanson said. “You could continue to do what you’re doing downtown” and not fund the subarea planning in the 2023-24 budget.