Arboretum excluded from Huether’s spending plan

Two new gardens and a wedding lawn slated to be put in at the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum next year might have to wait.

Mayor Mike Huether’s proposed 2016 capital budget unveiled last month is the largest outlook in city history. But his administration is taking some heat for what isn’t included in the $471-million spending forecast.

Last year, Huether’s five-year spending plan called for $136,000 in 2016 and another $425,000 in 2017 for improvements to the Mary Jo Wegner Arboretum, the city’s 115-acre botanical garden along Highway 11 and Perry Place. But a year later, those line items are nowhere to be found in Huether’s budget plan.

For some city councilors, who this summer are working through Huether’s proposal ahead of the upcoming 2016 budget passage next month, that’s not sitting well. Sioux Falls City Councilor Michelle Erpenbach said changes in budget proposals from one year to the next are expected. But to have a long-term project like the arboretum, included in the five-year spending outlook every year since at least 2011, cut completely is questionable, she said.

“This is something that has been in the process for years and for it to suddenly disappear – it didn’t get pushed back, it just disappeared – that’s the piece I don’t understand,”Erpenbach said.

Sioux Falls Parks and Recreation Director Don Kearney said each year the mayor re-prioritizes the city budget by adding and removing projects. Overall demand on the city, not just within the parks department, coupled with faster than expected progress at the botanical garden in recent years factored into the decision to pull the arboretum’s 2016 funding, he said.

“We’ve probably built out the arboretum faster than probably what anybody could have envisioned,” Kearney said, referring to the Mabel & Judy Jasper Educational Center constructed in 2013 using a gift from the Jasper family. “The fast build out of the arboretum has tasked us operationally a little bit.”

Lori Kiesow, arboretum director, called the projected cuts to her budget “disappointing.” She said the $136,000 the park expected to receive next year would have helped cover costs for a new formal garden, a knot garden – both intricately designed vegetation areas – and a wedding lawn for marriage ceremonies. The construction of a park road was also scheduled to happen in 2016.

Kiesow wouldn’t say how the cuts, if approved by the council, will impact the arboretum’s immediate plans, but is optimistic the council will reinstate the funding.

“We were planning on it,” she said. “Of course we’re disappointed and hoping that if it’s not put in, that it’s not simply wiped off but just postponed.”

Huether said in an email Wednesday the decision to cut next year’s arboretum funding was about prioritizing.

“Sioux Falls has unlimited wants and needs but has limited resources. Taxpayers want us to be prudent, responsible and make tough choices and that is what we do here,” he said. “The parks team and finance tackles the budget with vigor with prioritization a difficult but critical part of the deal.”

Sioux Falls Finance Director Tracy Turbak said although the arboretum funding isn’t included in the Huether’s proposed 2016 budget nor his five-year plan mapping spending through 2020, there’s always the possibility that it could become a higher priority next year and beyond.

“Every year is a new year when we start putting the plan together,” he said. “It’s a plan. It’s something that lives and breathes every year and looks a little bit different every year as we go through the requests and proposals that come in.”