The City of Chattanooga adopts an annual Capital Budget to fund capital projects. The Captial Budget is the first year of our five-year Capital Improvement Plan. The Plan is also updated annually.

The Capital Improvement Plan is the result of a coordinated approach to project selection and management that allows us to maintain a focused approach to allocation of capital funds.

Capital Projects are typically improvements to the physical assets of the City that require major infrequent expenditures for systematically constructing, maintaining and upgrading facilities. In cases where technological infrastructure or other improvement costs exceed our capacity to fund them in the City’s operating budget, they may also be considered for capital funding.

Capital project requests are submitted to the Office of Capital Planning annually by City Administrators. Once the projects are submitted, there are two principal steps in the recommendation process:

1) Evaluating individual projects to determine their merits and priority in relation to other projects.

2) Selecting projects in relation to available funding.

By evaluating the projects in relation to each other before any consideration is given to the amount of money that might be available, this process requires a focus on objectives and policies rather than on politics. The evaluation criteria are the foundation of project selection and are based on efficient and equitable provision of services in a manner that supports economic development and environmental concerns.

The initial evaluation of projects is to be done by the Department Heads preparing the budget request and should reflect departmental planning that caused the project to be requested. After all applications have been received, each department will have a scheduled meeting to review their submittals to ensure that each project is properly understood prior to staff evaluation and budgeting.

A city-wide project evaluation is done by the Office of Capital Planning and Department of Finance with assistance from the Regional Planning Agency. Finally, the project recommendations are reviewed with Department representatives and recommendations are presented to the Mayor and City Council.