County faces roughly $930 million 2027 shortfall; IJCC request drives majority of gap

Capital improvement staff reported a substantial preliminary financing gap for 2027 non-airport capital requests. "Based on the current bond and cash policies that we have in place, the county has available about $73,100,000 to fund the 2027 non airport request that we received this year," Vince Masterson told the committee. He said total departmental capital requests exceeded $1 billion and that the initial estimate shows an approximately $930,000,000 shortfall under the county's current bond-to-cash policies.

Masterson identified the IJCC request as the principal driver: "The major driver behind that number is the $858,000,000 IJCC project, which makes up about 85% of the total request," he said. Staff broke the shortfall into an estimated $883,000,000 bonding shortfall and roughly $47,300,000 in cash shortfall under current financing assumptions. Committee members noted the IJCC amount will dominate the bond discussion and pressed staff to refine breakouts in the subcommittee report.

Staff emphasized the figures are conceptual and will be adjusted during the CIC subcommittee's next review; the presentation asked members to consider other high-priority uses of the roughly $73 million available for non-IJCC projects. The committee did not vote on any financing action at this meeting; staff instructed departments to prepare testimony for the second meeting to contest or support initial scoring.