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Limited resources

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The recent Fountain Hills Blvd. project serves as a decent reminder of the fact that, no matter how much you plan and budget, things don’t always turn out quite like you expect.

What happened with Fountain Hills Blvd. appears to have been unavoidable. The crews got to work and, along the way, discovered new challenges that threw a monkey wrench into the cogs. You can read all of the details in our 1A coverage, but the short version is that extra time and resources had to be spent on addressing unforeseen challenges and, as a result, the project’s budget was only able to cover about half of what was originally planned. Instead of widening both sides of the road, we were only able to tackle one side for the time being.

And that, as they say, is how the cookie crumbles. The side of the road that was completed looks great, but we’ll just have to wait for that other side until we find the funding to get the ball rolling again. And that’s only “if” we find the funding.

That’s the situation Fountain Hills faces, only on a bigger scale. The Council and staff are taking on as many projects as they can manage with extremely limited resources, but it’s difficult to plan for the unexpected. The best way to do that is to have a healthy reserve fund, but we’re having too much difficulty making ends meet to bother with putting aside substantial funds for a rainy day.

And you can take that literally, considering the flood that destroyed several ball fields at Golden Eagle Park last year and cost the town hundreds of thousands of dollars in unexpected repairs.

What do we do the next time a big ticket surprise drops into our laps? How do we continue to cover the town’s needs when something as simple as shallow utility lines can devour a project’s budget? How can we find a solution when literally every option that’s put forth is immediately batted down from one direction or another?

We’ve spent years throwing spaghetti at the wall and the past two councils (along with staff and a long line of hired experts) have concluded that the issue is revenue. Sooner or later, folks, we’re going to have to make something stick.