- City's wishlist.

(soft music) - Malachi, what is Mayor Duggan's Capital agenda?

What is a capital plan and how is that different from a budget that people are used to hearing about?

- Yeah, so essentially this is a document, a very long document, I think it's close to 200 pages or something like that that identify some investments that this city needs to make over the next five fiscal years.

So, as part of the City of Detroit's budgeting process, every two years, this document is put together to kind of provide a roadmap for different kinds of investments that are needed, aspirational projects that the city would like to get done.

It's kind of a overhead, large 10,000 foot view of the city's wishlist of projects that it would like to dedicate some funding to in the next five years.

It's not a binding document.

This is something that again kind of provides a roadmap for the budgeting process which happens every year.

The city council is gonna have some input on this as well, but yeah, I think it's a good way to kind of think of it as like our our Christmas list as we're here in the holiday season.

- How does this capital plan differ from previous plans?

- It's a lot bigger.

That's the big kind of takeaway for me is that the mayor's spending priorities grew quite a bit since 2020.

This capital agenda is about 72% larger, which is about $600 million.

And I think part of that is the influx of the the Federal American Rescue Plan Act funding that Detroit received, it's allocation of pandemic relief funding, that accounts for part of it.

But the main takeaway for me is that there's a huge emphasis on open spaces and parks, the kind of parks and recreation planned spending quadrupled from the last plan that was approved back in 2020.

- Let's just go a little bit deeper.

So we're looking at things like parks, recreational spaces, what else is being targeted in this plan especially now that we have a very, very large sum of money added to the pot?

- Yeah, I mean, this can be broken down into a number of different categories.

The plan which anybody can read for themselves.

They can go on the city's website and take a look at this, and it's pretty easy to digest.

Aside from parks and recreation, which we can talk about some of the individual projects there, the water and sewerage department has some of the largest capital needs if we're talking about like infrastructure particularly, it represents about one fifth of the total capital agenda.

And so- - Oh wow.

- Right now the city's undertaking a big effort to replace water mains and lead service lines.

There's flood prevention programs that they are working on, storm water improvements, all of those kinds of like nuts and bolts, infrastructure investments are a major part of this plan, that goes so far as like bridges and roads as well.

There's an ongoing process this city's undertaking to make streets safer and improve street scapes particularly in like these commercial corridors making it easier for people to get around by bike or on foot, slowing down some of these roads, putting in speed humps so that pedestrians or even drivers don't have to worry so much about getting into crashes.

So those are some other things.

I mean, the city's also looking at what do we do with all of these vacant school buildings?

There was a really interesting study that was done last year of 63 of these buildings that the city has taken control over.

And the effort was to kind of like, okay so do we turn these into housing?

Do we turn these into office spaces, buildings?

Is there a way to maybe to turn them back into schools to bring kids back?

So that's another part of this, since these are all like neighborhood anchors too, that has a big impact.

Then there's also like really interesting little kind of nuggets of things, like the fire department wants some money so that they can get unmanned aerial vehicles, like UAV drones that have thermal imaging equipment on them so they can kind of see into burning buildings and apparently would help them locate parts of the building that are about to collapse or structural damage or things like that.

Everything from kind of big picture to these kind of more granular, interesting things are detailed in the plan.

- How is this going to impact a person's day-to-day life?

Maybe five years from now, 10 years from now, who's in the city of Detroit?

- Yeah, I mean, I think that's something to watch, right?

Like the devil's in the details.

These capital agendas are kind of a roadmap or a framework.

Again, they're not like legally binding documents.

So some of the stuff in here could change, some of the priorities could get shifted around, this is kind of just like a big picture look at what today the city would like to do a couple years down the road.

But let's say we're in 2028 and we're driving our flying cars around Detroit, and what do things look like?

Well you might see a park open up closer to your neighborhood depending on where you live.

You might see that pothole in the street that's been bugging you for years has been repaired.

You might see more speed humps in your neighborhood.

Maybe you're worried about speeding and cars kind of flying through there, and now that's something you don't have to worry about as much.

Maybe there's a blighted building that was on your corner that's been turned into affordable housing.

And look, I'm being really optimistic, right?

But like, these are the kinds of things that are included in this plan.

And I think that's kind of the ultimate goal is like let's look into the future, start planning for it now.

Start putting aside the resources now and be intentional about that.