City Faces More Tough Budget Decisions

COLUMBUS, Ohio—The City of Columbus is faced with more tough financial decisions as low tax revenues continue to trickle into the city.

Columbus leaders are being forced to scale back infrastructure projects. From road repair to building maintenance, many projects that were expected to be completed have been scratched off the list.

The city hoped to fund $239.1 million in capital improvements this year. But instead, just 10 percent of that will be done.

Consider Biking President Jeff Stephens pointed to locations within the city that could use bikeways or improvements to bikeways.

“We are really excited about the direction the city is taking. Quite frankly, we are pretty slow to catch up with many other competitive cities,“ Stephens said.

But the effort to catch up is slowing to a virtual standstill as city council announced its capital improvements budget for 2009.

The bottom line is that they can only fund just slightly more than $24 million in projects this year and only one bikeway project made the list.

Other projects that made the budget include:

• More than $1.2 million for miscellaneous development at Children’s Hospital
• $1.5 million for the Scioto Mile
• $1.3 million for bikeway improvements at the Westbank and Rich Street bridge
• More than $540,000 for Columbus Coated Fabrics

Funding the projects involves council members moving around capital budget funds from various projects that now will now be funded during this budget year—which ends Dec. 31.

The projects include dozens of street resurfacing projects, improvements in the Northland area and replacement of fire apparatus—to name a few.

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