City Council Minutes 2015 02 03 - Laserfiche WebLink

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City Council Meeting Minutes February 3, 2015 Page 10 of 16 The City staff and the Open Space Advisory Board are working to develop a policy to guide the use of the funds and address the concerns relative to preserving enough revenue to acquire open space land when they become available; ensure the funds are not prioritized for maintenance and parks over open space acquisition and to ensure there are adequate funds for these purposes, and in particular, to acquire open space candidate properties. In recognition of this history, the City Council's policy regarding these funds is as follows: 1. The City shall prioritize expenditures from the Open Space and Parks Fund to ensure there is sufficient funding to acquire properties on the City's Candidate Open Space ranking as they become available. Accordingly, the annual budget shall allocate funding as follows: a. Sufficient funding to pay for the City's share (joint partners) of the total projected cost to acquire property, if they come available, the current top three properties on the City's Candidate Open Space ranking. b. If there are Fund reserves remaining after satisfying priority (a) those reserves may also be budgeted for acquisition of parks and for development, construction, operation and maintenance of open space zones, trails, wildlife habitats, wetlands and parks. 2. To ensure there are adequate funds to acquire properties on the City's Candidate Open Space ranking. 3. In the event City purchases of a Candidate Open Space property would cause the year -end reserve balance in the Open Space and Parks Fund to be lower than the amount specified in section 2, the City Council shall evaluate options and commit to a course of action and timeframe to restore the reserve balance to the specified level. 4. Open Space and Parks Fund resources may be expended only for purposes clearly authorized by the most recently adopted ballot language and may not be expended to support the Recreation Center, Golf Course, Memory Square Pool or similar recreation facilities. In calculating the proposed reserve, the top three Candidate Open Space properties include approximately 350 acres of land. Staff's preliminary estimate of the average per acre value of this land is $45,000 per acre, with some properties having a higher value and some having a lower value. Some of these properties are adjacent to Lafayette and the City expects to partner with both Boulder County and Lafayette to purchase those properties if they become available (Boulder County contributing 50 %, and Lafayette and Louisville each contributing 25 %). In other properties only adjacent to Boulder County each party would contribute 50% of the total if those properties become available.