PORT TOWNSEND — Port Townsend staff presented city council members with a high-level quarterly update on the status of projects included on their 2025 workplan.
The workplan, covered Monday night, was adopted last July, City Manager John Mauro said.
“July is a long time ago. Things change between July and then the budget,” he said. “The workplan informs the budget. We work really hard to get that done by the end of December, and then the actual year starts. Then things change over time; we have staff turnover, we have increased prices, we have a new grant that we didn’t think we were going to get.”
The goal of the workshop was to appraise the council of how projects are progressing and what things have changed, Mauro said.
Mauro gave a brief explanation of the presentation’s color-coded status indicators.
“Green generally means on track as we expected,” Mauro said. “Yellow means there is a hangup or a pause or something we need to talk through. Red means it’s stopped or significantly impacted by something.”
Of the 61 projects, 45 showed a green status while 12 were yellow and four were red.
The document can be found on Monday’s city council agenda under the “Quarterly Workplan Review” header.
Mauro and Emma Bolin, the city’s director of planning and community development, gave brief explanations for the red-status projects.
A federal Inflation Reduction Act Grant received through the U.S. Forest Service may not be completely fulfilled, Bolin said. That has led the city to pause some of the planning for an urban forestry plan.
“(The grant) is part of the grants that’s being called into question by the federal government,” Bolin said. “There was a pause on the work from our funder. That has been unpaused, but they have shared with us that it is unclear if this will go away in the next fiscal year.”
The city received a request to accelerate the project, with the grant’s future uncertain, Bolin said.
“It’s a three-year project that we can’t accelerate in a four-month time frame,” she said.
The adjusted plan is to get the deliverables that are already in play while holding off on any further community engagement and technical work, Bolin said.
Staff will revisit the plan depending on how the federal budget affects the grant in the fall, Bolin said.
Rezoning the city’s golf park was excluded from the 2025 work docket earlier this year, Mauro said.
A deer management plan was put off in an attempt to maintain a focus on areas prioritized in the comprehensive plan update, Mauro said.
At the city’s March 17 council meeting, a motion was passed to direct staff to pause work on a pilot fee program for parking in the downtown core.
Mayor David Faber, who proposed pausing the project, said the plan as it was presented in the Feb. 24 meeting would require more work than staff could afford to give in the coming year.
Mauro also touched on yellow-marked projects, offering a categorical explanation for their status.
“It’s so great for us to have project managers,” Mauro said. “It’s so great for us to keep grinding out this amount of work, $80 million worth of funded capital projects. Really it’s about capacity. We’ve been trying for a couple of years to hire a deputy public works director, a city engineer.”
The problem of having too many grant awards and too many funded projects is a good problem to have, Mauro said.
“It’s really hard to get it all through the door,” he said. “That’s really a theme for some of these things.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@sequimgazette.com.
