By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
The Princeton Council was presented on Monday with roughly $6.5 million in big and small ticket items that municipal government departments are seeking funding for, everything from $350,000 for tree maintenance to $5,500 to replace radios for emergency responders., Town administrator Marc D. Dashield walked officials through a prioritized list of capital requests and their cost, with the council needing to decide whether to fund all of them or not. High on that list was spending $950,000 to buy two properties on Clearview Avenue from the Princeton First Aid & Rescue Squad to help toward the construction of a new PFARS headquarters., Yet Councilman Bernard P. Miller raised whether the town should be spending that money in 2017 “if the money is not going to be needed this year by PFARS.”, “If it’s needed next year, we can buy it next year,” he said. “So I think we need enough visibility into PFARS’ spending plan to be able to understand exactly what they need, when they need it, so that we’re not committing ourselves to do things that are very expensive, unless it’s really necessary to keep the project on schedule.”, For his part, Dashield said he is trying to set up a meeting with PFARS to answer the concerns Miller had raised., The funding requests came from across government agencies, winnowed to roughly $6.5 million to stay within self-imposed debt limits council adheres to. Library Director Brett Bonfield was on hand to make the case for a $150,000 request for surveillance cameras at the first and third floors of the library, the busiest municipal library in the state with 800,000 to 850,000 visits a year., “And so things that might not necessarily happen in other public spaces are more likely to happen just because you have so many people through the building,” he said., He told council the library is looking to replace the cameras it has, from analogue to digital, and noted the $150,000 price tag was negotiated down., “This is as low as we felt we could go and still get quality cameras that we feel like are required in order to ensure the safety of the thousands of people who visit the library every day,” he said., Later in the meeting, the head of the volunteer board that advises council on financial matters critiqued the way the town does capital spending, including a “poor track record” of estimating project costs., Scott Sillars, chairman of the Citizens Finance Advisory Committee, pointed to how government departments have “regularly shown an inability to spend items previously approved in a timely fashion, making it very difficult to plan for capital on a year in, year out basis.”, One question officials wrestled with is whether projects that cost a small amount should go into the regular budget., “I don’t know if any of us have a great understanding of how do you make that determination of when it makes sense, financially, to capitalize something,” Mayor Liz Lempert said.
