Washington’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2017-2018 allocates money for numerous projects, including drainage improvements and a new fishing pier.

The proposed budget allocates $200,000 for drainage improvements at various locations in the Jack’s Creek basin.

In the aftermath of a major storm in September 2016 and Hurricane Matthew in October 2016, several city residents appeared before the City Council on several occasions to express their concerns over flood/drainage issues. The residents said they couldn’t continue to make costly repairs to their homes over and over after major storms.

Although the city began making drainage improvements in the Jack’s Creek basin about 12 years ago, city officials acknowledged those improvements, made in phases as money become available, need to be expanded and expedited. During a council meeting in September 2016, Councilman Doug Mercer said doing drainage projects in phases does not do much to solve the problem. “I think it’s time for us to bite the bullet. If we need a $10 million or $15 million project, let’s put together a bond issue, ask the people to vote on it. If the people say they want to correct the problem, we borrow the money and fix it. It’s time to quit kicking the can down the road,” Mercer said then.

At the council’s retreat in February, Mercer said, “It’s a matter of how much farther back upstream can we afford this year. We started here. We moved to here. How much can we finance this year? Regrettably, we’re putting $150,000 to $200,000 a year into a $10-million project. I made the statement one time that 50 years from now we’ll complete what we said we needed to do this year, and we’ll have a completely new set of problems. We need to go ahead and bite the bullet and decided how we’re going to finance it and do what we need to do.”

The proposed budget allocates $98,000 toward a new fishing pier at Havens Gardens.

The city is providing $14,300 in cash and $2,125 in in-kind services for the project. The N.C. Department of Environmental Quality earmarked $83,700 from its North Carolina Public Beach and Coastal Water Access Program for the new pier. Earlier this year, the council adopted a grant project ordinance in the amount of $98,000 for the project, $5,000 for professional services and $93,000 for construction.

Plans call for the new pier to include cutouts from which handicapped people could fish, according to a city document. Though the new pier is included in the city’s capital-improvements plan, its tentative budget does not reflect the cost of the cutouts, according to a memorandum from City Manager Bobby Roberson to the mayor and council members.

For more information on what’s in the proposed city budget, see future editions of the Daily News.