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back to Council a more complete picture of the project. The design for the Kottinger Creek Restoration project has been completed and involved several iterations of neighborhood discussions with staff. Staff has not had an opportunity to present the plans to Council and it wanted to have this discussion with Council prior to allocating additional funds. By removing funding from the Aquatic Center Reserve for the Alviso Adobe Community Park project, Mr. Thorne wanted to ensure it would not create any safety hazards or allowing any safety hazards to exist. Mr. Fialho assured Council that removing funding from the Aquatic Center Reserve would not create a safety hazard. Ms. McGovern was concerned that a previous Council must have approved the Kottinger Creek Restoration project at $300,000 when it was originally presented to Council. Mr. Bocian said Council approved a CIP that had an estimated project funding amount of $300,000. Staff indicated that the project was subject to the overall design similar to the Firehouse Arts Center. A typical practice taken in the past is for staff to try and create a reserve and place funding in a reserve based upon staff's best guesstimate on what a project would cost. Initially, the reserve is used to begin the master plan and design process and the project goes from a general concept and idea to something that is real, and that transition is typically what determines the overall cost of the project. In many ways, comparing the total estimated project cost included in the staff report with the final construction costs following project acceptance will provide a more meaningful indicator of the variance between project cost estimates and final project costs. Ms. McGovern said she was looking for a closer estimate to what it would cost when Council first approved a project. She is gaining a sense from the community that the original project cost estimates keep increasing and in the long run, it will take away funding for future CIP projects because the costs continually are increasing. She would be more comfortable to willingly consider CIP projects if staff could gather further information and provide Council with a closer estimate before it considers making the project a priority. Mr. Fialho said this was the strategy staff presented to Council several months ago. In a way, the five City Council priority projects are old projects with old funding and to some degree the slate is being wiped clean after the first part of the next fiscal year with the CIP. Going forward, staff is proposing to take all of the General Fund transfers from the Operating Budget into the CIP and rather than assigning the transfers to specific project reserves, place the transfers into the CIP Reserve. What Council ends up funding is the planning for the project and defining what it believes the cost of the project would be based upon factual information from an engineer's estimate. At that point, Council has obtained an engineer's estimate and the funding is transferred from the Capital Improvement Program Reserve (CIPR) into the project. Ms. McGovern asked if the community would understand this process. Mr. Fialho said yes. Mr. Brozosky pointed out that the original cost of the Firehouse Arts Center was not $6 million dollars. Pleasanton City Council Minutes 10 03/07/06