High Priority

On the agenda for tomorrow night’s City Council meeting there will be a report on the City Council’s priorities for next fiscal year.  According to the staff report, the purpose of this is to:

…provide an opportunity for the City Council to give direction on the City s priorities for departmental work plans…and to strengthen the City Council’ s understanding of staff’ s current work plans and the resources available to carry them out…

Which is just gobbledygook for basically keeping the Council more in the loop on what the heck staff is working on, but I suppose one wouldn’t put “keeping Council in the loop” in a publically available staff report.  

After several meetings, and because City staff has so many projects under its collective belt, the Council was asked to prioritize which projects they thought were of “highest” priority or simply “high” priority.  Of course there were no other designations and there were, I assume, no limitations on how many projects each Councilperson could give a designation to. So – surprise, surprise – there were no projects that did not recieve some sort of a rating, although I suppose declining to give a designation would imply a lack of priority in that project.

What project was rated of utmost importance to our Councilpeople?  None other than:

Address Telecom financial issue- implement plans/recommendations

That one received five “highest” designations.

Second in priority levels is:

Work with the Housing Commission to develop an acquisition and development plan for expanding affordable housing opportunities using the remaining Measure A Guyton exemption

And third highest is:

Former Navy Base  Redevelopment - Secure Conveyance of Alameda Point from Navy and negotiate development entitlements with SunCal

The three highest aren’t necessarily surprising I suppose.  What is surprising is the stuff that sort of gets shuffled off to the bottom of the list of priorities.  Even less of a priority are Library related issues.   It appears that a lot of overlapping projects like the transportation master plan and Climate Protection/Environment issues got combined into one project, but there are two Library related projects, one project is essentially a subset of the other, yet for some reason no one thought to combine the two?  Here is the one the received a bit higher priority:

Develop a long range plan for library service (includes Measure a funds  allocation for branch improvements

And the one that received a lower priority:

Provide facility and service improvements to both Bay Farm Island and West End Libraries

Maybe they were just getting tired at the end.