Expenses related to a hillside beautification project, which cost three times the original estimate, were under scrutiny during Tuesday’s Erlanger City Council meeting.
The issue of removing trees from powerlines along the hillside at 3315 Alice St. was initially brought to the council in April this year by councilmember Diana Niceley.
After she spoke, members of the Niceley family spoke during the public comment period of subsequent meetings, originally citing the problem as a safety concern. When addressing the matter, Mayor Jessica Fette gave a detailed timeline of the events unfolding and stated that the matter was more of a beautification concern than a safety issue.
Councilmember Rebecca Reckers brought the Alice Street matters back to the table after seeing information in the council’s monthly check register. Originally the council agreed in a voice vote to spend around $5,000 for the beautification of the hillside, but when Reckers saw a note on spending $1,700 for trees it prompted her to follow up on the matter. After reaching out both by email and verbally last month she was told that information was not available.
Due to several factors, the final cost of the project ended up being a little over $15,000. This cost included grading the hillside and additional sidewalk maintenance.
In the council’s original agreement, when the beautification task force brought forth the recommendation for the Alice Street matter, they decided to do $5,000 worth of beautification in which they would share some supplies, such as fencing, with other projects. The city’s parks team would also be the ones to install the fencing and work on the beautification of the area. The money was slated to come out of the city’s beautification budget, which contains about $52,000.
“So what we received looked like it was in the neighborhood of $20,000, which it didn’t look entirely accurate just at first glance cause I knew the fencing was a multi-project purchase,” said Reckers. “So I had asked for this to be brought to council because the numbers weren’t aligning with what we had agreed upon.”
Reckers also stated that in the more detailed breakdown provided by city administrator Peter Glenn there appeared to be some miscoding of the budget line items from which the work drew its money. At any rate, the project was going to exceed the $5,000 originally agreed on. She also said she wanted to follow up since there has been contention around the project since its beginning, and residents are also asking about the timeline of improvements to Sherbourne Park, in which the Beautification Task Force plays a small role.
“I want to make sure that I can properly communicate to our constituents what the timeline looks like for these things that the task force has mentioned as priorities prior to this coming to life,” said Reckers.
Glenn followed up on Reckers’ concerns with a breakdown of the project and how different aspects of the on-paper breakdown did not match the project’s initial cost projections.
The four-board horse fencing in the Alice Street project was also used in multiple projects across the city. Glenn said since a sixth of the fencing purchased, originally at $5,300, was used on the Alice Street project they wrote in $900 for the project’s fencing cost. The $1,700 in trees was decided at the June beautification task force meeting to mirror the beautification efforts across Erlanger.
The project also required additional grading of the hillside, which the city did not have the resources to handle in-house. As a result, the city reached out to a contractor to clean up the hillside for $6,000. The contract performed the grading as well as help with clearing some of the overgrown areas. Glenn said he felt the contractor was a good choice because that specific work had to be done before the fencing could be set.
The contractor also did work that would be coded as street maintenance by removing some sidewalk very old and deteriorated sidewalk that was a tripping hazard. Glenn clarified that that line item was moved to the street maintenance section and out of the beautification budget. Everything else was done by the city’s crew when it came time to put up the fencing and trees.
Final costs put expenses out of the beautification budget at $10,104 and $5,500 came out of the city’s street maintenance line item.
Overall, the contention was that much of the work (which ended up being greater than the council’s and beautification task force’s initial estimations) was done without more input from elected leaders. Although the city staff has leeway in determining how it goes about its work, Reckers followed up that in the future she would just like to be informed if there is a significant variance to a project. Normally task forces would report these changes, however, the beautification task force had not met since June and the minutes for that meeting were not available until recently.
“For me, I would just prefer the transparency moving forward if a project is going to take such a shift,” said Reckers.
Glenn said this project is a learning experience and that in the future they’ll be more thoughtful about making sure everyone is aware of more high-risk types of projects.